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I've had my Thinkpad T30 for about 3 years now and I think it is the best laptop I have ever used. Before that, I used a Thinkad 765D (which I still have). At work, we used IBM hardware, so when I wanted my own laptop, I bought one direct from IBM. Sure it was more expensive, but I never regretted it. Linux driver support was always there so I never had any serious problem getting the hardware working. I really wish IBM didn't sell their laptop division, as I don't think anyone else could produce a product with the same support and durability of the Thinkpads that I own. I don't know about the R series you've dealt with, but the T series and the ones before it were excellent machines.

Regarding sleep/hibernate on Linux, I have no idea if this is useful information from your perspective but the Thinkwiki provides a lot of material on how to get it to work. I wouldn't know if it works for everyone, but I did get it to work on my T41 (it did take a kernel recompile, but as these things go it was fairly painless - at least, it did not involve any patching or bios fiddling or whatever). Now that it is working I use both modes on a regular basis with no problems.

Sleep mode also used to work on my old laptop (a bizarre bit of kit from Advent). Hibernate, however, did not - only fairly recent kernels seem to support it to an acceptable level.

A photo of the drive, looks like a normal notebook harddisk and was made in 2001 (at least the example shown).

thinkwiki lists the manufacturer of 08K9509 as "SSD". But if anyone spots 32GB flash drives, or anything 16GB or larger at that price, please let me know.

I've used Thinkpads since 1997 or so. They are well designed tanks. If you do a lot of text input, you will want the joystick mouse control. Touch pads, drive me bats now. Over the years, they have gotten a little less sturdy but they are still very good. My favorite is still a 600 for it's small size and reliability. My current model is a poorly kept T23, which I did not buy from Certified Used. Power management works flawlessly on all models, with some tweaking - usually as simple as turning off ACPI and using APM for sleep.

The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs. All computers look "obsolete" in a few years. The small difference in performance between small, cute laptops does not justify the extra weight. You might think it does today, but two or three years from now, when clock speeds have doubled again, you won't. As an extreme example consider two 10 year old laptops, a 560 and a 380 thinkpad. Today, the 560, is still cute but a technically superior 380 is an ugly brick. At the time, the 380 was 50% faster and had twice the memory and a much better screen. The screen is still better, but the fan is loud, the case is huge, the 16MB of RAM is laughable and it's just too heavy. Unless your hands are unusually large, consider an X series.

Avoid high school castoffs and other poorly handled and maintained notebooks. Screws should be replaced every time because they depend on a nylon coating to work. When you take them out, you mess that coat up and things get loose. Really badly maintained models will have missing screws and broken structural parts. They are not reliable and you might have to boot them daily like a Windoze machine. Yes, that's the worst I've ever seen in a Thinkpad. Lesser computers might not boot at all after such bad treatment.

I've used Thinkpads since 1997 or so. They are well designed tanks. If you do a lot of text input, you will want the joystick mouse control. Touch pads, drive me bats now. Over the years, they have gotten a little less sturdy but they are still very good. My favorite is still a 600 for it's small size and reliability. My current model is a poorly kept T23, which I did not buy from Certified Used. Power management works flawlessly on all models, with some tweaking - usually as simple as turning off ACPI and using APM for sleep.

The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs. All computers look "obsolete" in a few years. The small difference in performance between small, cute laptops does not justify the extra weight. You might think it does today, but two or three years from now, when clock speeds have doubled again, you won't. As an extreme example consider two 10 year old laptops, a 560 and a 380 thinkpad. Today, the 560, is still cute but a technically superior 380 is an ugly brick. At the time, the 380 was 50% faster and had twice the memory and a much better screen. The screen is still better, but the fan is loud, the case is huge, the 16MB of RAM is laughable and it's just too heavy. Unless your hands are unusually large, consider an X series.

Avoid high school castoffs and other poorly handled and maintained notebooks. Screws should be replaced every time because they depend on a nylon coating to work. When you take them out, you mess that coat up and things get loose. Really badly maintained models will have missing screws and broken structural parts. They are not reliable and you might have to boot them daily like a Windoze machine. Yes, that's the worst I've ever seen in a Thinkpad. Lesser computers might not boot at all after such bad treatment.

I've used Thinkpads since 1997 or so. They are well designed tanks. If you do a lot of text input, you will want the joystick mouse control. Touch pads, drive me bats now. Over the years, they have gotten a little less sturdy but they are still very good. My favorite is still a 600 for it's small size and reliability. My current model is a poorly kept T23, which I did not buy from Certified Used. Power management works flawlessly on all models, with some tweaking - usually as simple as turning off ACPI and using APM for sleep.

The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs. All computers look "obsolete" in a few years. The small difference in performance between small, cute laptops does not justify the extra weight. You might think it does today, but two or three years from now, when clock speeds have doubled again, you won't. As an extreme example consider two 10 year old laptops, a 560 and a 380 thinkpad. Today, the 560, is still cute but a technically superior 380 is an ugly brick. At the time, the 380 was 50% faster and had twice the memory and a much better screen. The screen is still better, but the fan is loud, the case is huge, the 16MB of RAM is laughable and it's just too heavy. Unless your hands are unusually large, consider an X series.

Avoid high school castoffs and other poorly handled and maintained notebooks. Screws should be replaced every time because they depend on a nylon coating to work. When you take them out, you mess that coat up and things get loose. Really badly maintained models will have missing screws and broken structural parts. They are not reliable and you might have to boot them daily like a Windoze machine. Yes, that's the worst I've ever seen in a Thinkpad. Lesser computers might not boot at all after such bad treatment.

A lot of elitists loved the IBM ThinkPad T-series (particularly those with a "p" after the model name). Even with Lenovo's recent purchase of them, the laptops have remained solid hardware for Linux. I have run both Ubuntu and Gentoo on them. See ThinkWiki for some good information on running Linux on the whole ThinkPad line.

There are other good notebooks which can often be just as good. Just figure out what hardware you want to run and how much you're willing to pay for it. If you are tech-savy, install it yourself (sadly, you'll probably have to pay the Windows tax (though you may find some bare notebooks, sales on a win32 laptop will often be cheaper than a notebook with no software)). If not, get it from LinuxCertified.

If you don't get something mainstream, be sure to try a LiveCD in it first & dig up as much dirt on it as possible.

The fundamental reason why companies do not open up their drivers is because the average end user considers it a Linux problem when Linux doesn't have proper support for a given proprietary piece of hardware, instead of a problem with the maker of the chipset in question.

I think one reason for this is because there are a zillion consumer devices out there and no real place to be able to look up a given piece of consumer hardware and see who is making the chips for said hardware, and whether the chipset in question has a Linux driver. More importantly, if a given chipset doesn't have a Linux driver, the documentation should tell us whether this is because the chipset in question is closed, or if it is because no one has had a chance to write a driver.

If this information is out there, when people give the usual "Linux sucks because it doesn't support X piece of hardware" flame, the reply can be "blame the makers of X piece of hardware, not Linux". If this mindset catches on, companies will start supporting Linux better. For example, I bought a Creative Zen Nano instead of an iPod Nano because the Zen had full Linux support; the iPod doesn't.

The problem with making this online database is that someone will need to be motivated to make such a database; this is a non-trivial task. The wiki model is perfect for something like this. Indeed, someone has a wiki-based database like this for IBM Thinkpad computers

Found it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_UltraPort

Looks like it was for a variety of peripherals.

Had to download the A21 User's Guide but when I saw reference to an UltraPort for webcams, I googled that and hit the Wikipedia entry.

ThinkWiki has an entry with pics:

http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraPort

Netgate and ThinkWiki are your friends. Yes, being a bitter Linux user isn't easy. I personally have not given up yet, having both a Radeon 9200 SE and a wifi card from Netgate. But it seems like things will never change, and it isn't very encouraging to see even the general slashdot vibe to be "pragmatism is god; clinging to some idealistic impossibility isn't pragmatic". Of course, to be pragmatic one must have a goal, and the goal is rarely stated or assumed to be "getting things done today" when it may very well be "advancing my personal view of what society should be" or "improving things". Will the next Linux be chicken-and-egged to death because no vendors will provide drivers because it isn't popular enough? I don't want to see the hobbyist OS die not from lack of effort but from lack of drivers. Linux is popular enough to get vendor written drivers in some areas where the spec is not available, but is left high and dry in other areas such as many webcams, scanners, and other consumer level devices.

Anyone know if this can be adapted for the Thinkpad's active protection system?

Here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Script_for_theft_ala rm_using_HDAPS

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/HDAPS

It seems a lot of people just assume that undervolting would be something akin to getting the inverse result of overclocking.

Here's the link to an interesting page about undervolting pentium M processors.

Experience shows that the processor may continue working correctly at lower-than-nominal voltages and frequencies, thereby reducing power consumption, heat and fan noise.

Even if your system seems stable, it may still suffer transient faults leading to arbitrary data corruption. In addition, errors in following these instructions (or changes between processor models) may operate the CPU above its nominal parameters, with effects up to and including laptop meltdown.

There's also a thourough discussion and user results from undervoltage on this thread.

Dell, HP and the other laptops are low grade crap compared to an Apple Laptop when it comes to running linux on them. I was amazed at the lack of any fight with hardware.

The Linux Thinkpad community is rather large with mailing lists and wikis (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki).

Really? Everything I read tells me that the crappy closed ATI drivers are still faster when it comes to 3D than the open source drivers.

I mean...its cool that at least one set of cards with decent 3D hardware has open driver, but those drivers are not for gamers to use. Its for me to use to get EXA.

I just got myself a Thinkpad 380ED, circa 1997. Built like a brick, looks like one too. Hopefully this will make my college friends envious of how I can carry around such a big notebook with a weak processor and nearly geriatric battery. :P

IBM also had two ThinkPad models that did that, in the 755CDV and the 755CV (same as the CDV, but no optical drive).

I have Debian Sarge running beautifully on my 600e. Sound and everything. http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is the place to go for Linux on ThinkPad goodness. Also get on the Linux-ThinkPad mailing list. Details also on ThinkWiki.