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The Real Lenovo Laptops - Blank Disk, No Linux
wehe writes "A post from two weeks ago mentioned Lenovo Preloading SUSE Linux on ThinkPad notebooks. But in an interview with LinuxPlanet, Rajat Aggarwal, Lenovo's worldwide product manager for ThinkPad T Series, said that Lenovo will sell the new T60p laptop both on its Web site and through its direct and indirect sales channels. 'But we are not pre-loading it with Linux,' he told LinuxPlanet. Still, Lenovo will be breaking new ground with the level of support given to Linux by a major laptop manufacturer, according to the worldwide product manager."
They're obviously promoting piracy by not preinstalling Windows XP(TM) on their laptops! Time to pay them a visit...
According to this link, "I recently wrote that Lenovo was the first of the major hardware vendors to seriously pre-install Linux -- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, to be exact. And, they have.
At LinuxWorld, however, some of them were doing their darnest to spin that "no, no, they're not really pre-installing it. They're only sort of supporting it." You could almost see the terror in some of their eyes that Microsoft was going to come along and then stagger them with outrageous new rates for XP and, someday, Vista.
Get over it guys. You do pre-install, you do support it, and it's time to stop pretending that you only sort of support it. Yes, to get it pre-installed you do need to buy more than a "onesie or twosie" as one Lenovo staffer put it to me. Other Lenovo employees, however, confided that Lenovo can certainly install SLED rather than sending a system with a blank hard drive, a copy of SLED on a DVD, and a promise that all the devices will work correctly. And, that Lenovo would be willing to do so even for its smallest customers."
Actually, I wish that everybody shipped laptops like this. I have a Windows laptop from Compaq. First thing I did when I got it was to wipe the disk, and reinstall Windows. I would be even less comfortable with a Linux system that someone else set up for me.
I wonder if there are some licensing issues (agreements with Microsoft) that have made them do this, or whether it's customers like me.
After using Ubuntu on my various Thinkpad models for a few months now, I am realizing that there is a compatibility layer there that I've yet to see with any other distro on a Thinkpad. I've had VERY good luck with autodetection and autoconfiguration of a lot of hardware with Ubuntu. I've been endlessly impressed.
In a perfect world, I would look forward to seeing a CD Wallet of Linux distros that came witrh your new Thinkpad. A person could have thier choice. They could mutli-boot, with everything from Ubuntu down to, of course, Windows.
I have one unanswered question about the biometrics, though, and it's support under Linux. Does any one have any experience with this finger print reader found on the T43?
I have yet to read anywhere online about a similar incident, so I thought I'd post it here.
Last week I got my new T60P Thinkpad in, and started my normal gentoo install procedure. Unfortunately the latest minimal CD didn't have a working ethernet driver, so I resorted to the LiveCD. I popped it in, and it successfully booted into Gnome without error. Everything, that I checked at least, seemed to be working as normal as far as net access and peripherals. I hop over to console 1 and start in on the harddrive. Delete Windows, keep the Thinkpad Rescue partition, set up an XFS partition, download the stage3, unpack, everything is looking good. Chroot, download the latest kernel from kernel.org, and go ahead and do my emerge --sync. This is where things go blamo....
As this is at work, I had other things to do, and I didn't bother to switch to console 2 during the emerge --sync. I've left consoles up on the screen before that were running sync, so I thought nothing of it. I would soon find out that this was a big mistake.
I get back to the laptop, and the screen is visually hung on pulsating text that would normally be scrolling on the left side as the portage tree is written. I attempt to switch to console 2, which it does, but that screen is completely black with no console. Try other consoles, same thing. Try console 1, no change. Still all black. Caps lock and num-lock work, but the video isn't having any of it. I hard power down.
Upon powering back up, things get really interesting. There is not post screen or image that comes up. There is however, vertical color lines which begin to appear, first on the right side of the screen then, on the left. The fade of the screen goes from black, some color, then eventually to all white. It appears the screen diffuses from black to white, then back to black, then to white. and so on... Kinda disturbing to see new hardware do this.
After powering down and scratching my head, my coworker and I, decide to hook it up to an external monitor. Well, what appears on the monitor is something that looks like Donkey Kong gone wrong on an old Atari. Imagine a stepped pattern of horizontally decreasing levels, left to right, but evenly spaced vertically. Like Donkey Kong, except no Ape (?) barrels or damsel in distress.
So my coworker and I start discussing what might have gone wrong. Since console1 was scrolling pretty fast, we can only guess that there was a problem with the console framebuffer and the hardware, which resulted in something getting fried. Yes, some magic smoke was let out somewhere. We thought it might be the LCD display, but the output of the external monitor ruled that out, and really pointed to video hardware.
The replacement should be in sometime soon, but its rather shocking to see something that new crap out the way it did, especially with the spec's on that machine.
Anyone have any ideas on what caused the hardware failure? Driver bug causing overheating? Console buffer memory maxout (256Mb onboard Video)??
Theories welcome!