It has arrived
Right, I take back every unfriendly thing I've said about Bluelink. They managed to get my new z60m laptop (and I may well be the first one to install linux on that machine, according to Tux Mobil) in Deventer the day after they took delivery themselves. It's a gorgeous machine. Pictures and howto-install later... I'm making recovery cd's right now.
Update
Apart from the singularly sticky Centrino and Windows stickers, and the silly location of the Escape key (which may be the final straw for my vi addiction), there's really very little wrong with this laptop. It's sturdy, got a gorgeous screen, a keyboard with a great feel -- almost as if I'm typing on a full-size keyboard -- and installing Linux seems pretty easy.
Kubuntu wasn't able to downsize the Windows partition, but SuSE 10 was. And SuSE has very, very beautiful screen fonts and in general a very polished install. But I also wanted to try Kubuntu, which I'm upgrading right now, while also restoring my home directory from the disk of my old Dell. (Which, despite promises hasn't been returned, repaired, to me before Christmas.) Bad Dell.
Updated update
Installing Kubuntu Breezy Linux on the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad z60m:
- Suspend to ram works -- out of the box, if not with the fn-f4.
- Suspend to disk works -- out of the box
- After running sudo apt-get install libdvdread3; sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh, dvd playback works, practically out of the box
- X11 works, right resolution and everything. I haven't tested 3D acceleration with the ATI X600, but dvd playback is smooth and that's what counts
- Sound works
- The drives are approached by default using the SATA drivers, which apparently implies DMA, which is good
- Mounting usd drives works (restored my home dir that way). However, Kubuntu mounts all partitions on the same mountpoint. Didn't know that was possible.
- Connecting to my camera works
- Wireless -- would have worked out of the box if the detection hadn't preferred the open, unprotected, default settings wlan of my neighbours.
- Wired network works
SuSE shows much the same, except that SuSE enables all the wierd and wonderful thinkpad buttons out of the box, including the suspend button.
The permanently running fans are a "feature" of many newer Thinkpads, according to ThinkWiki.
All I can say is, I wish every laptop were as linux-compatible as this one. There's not much heroics in this report -- if I find it necessary to do somethinge extraordinary I'll update this entry.
/hardware | permanent link | 16 comments |
Re: It has arrived
Irina wrote on Sat, 24 Dec 2005 14:52
And still no Dell. I'm envious!
Re: It has arrived
Tom von Schwerdtner wrote on Sun, 25 Dec 2005 22:55
Glad to hear it works so well. I'm getting a z60t in a week or so and it's a little comforting to hear that I won't have to brave completely new territory.
Enjoy your new toy!
Re: It has arrived
Troy Unrau wrote on Mon, 26 Dec 2005 08:22
One thing you'll notice with *ubuntu is that DMA will be turned off by default on your optical drives. I mistake, if you ask me - but anyway, you'll probably want to turn that on in hdparm.conf before attempting to burn anything, and it'll help dvd playback a little as well.
Cheers
Re: It has arrived
Rob Merrell wrote on Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:19
Nooooooo, don't give up VI! On most systems I've worked with the escape key sends ctrl-[, so using that same key combination in place of the escape key works. IMHO it's even better than pressing escape because the fingers do not need to leave the home row.
Stick to you guns man
Re: Re: It has arrived
kaleissin wrote on Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:12
You mean to say neither of you remap the ESC? My laptop (currently out of order) has the F1-key where the ESC ought to be, so I've remapped the ESC-function and the help-function inside vim itself (moved help to F12 :) ). If you use oldschool vi (you do still run X right?) xmodmap is your friend.
Re: It has arrived
Tom Carnap wrote on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:50
Hi, I have a small question. Is the WSXGA (1.680 x 1.050) resolution on your thinkpad not to big for a 15'4 screen? I can't decide between a WXGA and a WSXGA Thinkpad z60m. I fear that all icons and fonts will be to small on WSXGA. And extrapolation isn't an option either, since no linux desktop environment is completly vectorbased.
Re: Re: It has arrived
Boudewijn Rempt wrote on Wed, 28 Dec 2005 14:51
No, this resolution is about perfect. It allows fonts to be nice and crisp (because they can use extra pixels), and because the icons in KDE can be used in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32 and 48x48 for toolbars, and up to 128x128 for desktop and konquerer, the icons aren't too small either. I'm using 22x22 toolbar icons and 64x64 desktop/konqueror icons.
I used to have 1600x1200 in 15" and that was fine, too -- and I've got bad eyes and use fairly big fonts. One thing that helps enormously is setting the X11 dpi setting right. That is, don't trust to Gnome's broken, hard-coded dpi setting.
Re: It has arrived
Nephiel wrote on Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:07
I'm glad to read this! I too received a Z60m I ordered for Christmas, and I was planning to use Ubuntu on it. After browsing ThinkWiki I had doubts about the X600, DMA and DVD playback... I'm relieved. Now the real challenge will be the fingerprint reader, but that can wait. I made the 7 recovery CDs and resized the XP partition with Partition Magic; now I'm ready to ubuntize. Your post and comments were very helpful. Thanks!
Re: It has arrived
Boudewijn wrote on Fri, 20 Jan 2006 21:48
I'm having no end of problems with device permissions in KUbuntu, though. The dvd drive seems to persist in not wanting to be used by a mere user... If I do a chmod a+rwx /dev/* (brute force, I know, but what the thingummy...) then everything works. I've noticed the same with audio in my other Kubuntu installs. Only the sudo-enabled user can use the audio device, the others must content themselves with silence. This is a bit annoying.
I know I could probably fiddle with groups and so on, but if I wanted to fiddle, I'd be using Slackware still. I've grown out of the desire to fiddle.
Re: It has arrived
Bernhard wrote on Sun, 22 Jan 2006 01:01
I've installed KUbuntu on my z60m, too. However, the network is not working correctly. My router configures the network card via DHCP and I can then ping outside the local network and even use icq. I can list ftp directories but can't download big files. Http doesn't work at all. Does anybody have a clou of what's going wrong here? Any help is very appreciated.
Re: Re: It has arrived
Bernhard wrote on Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:36
Answering myself: The MTU was set to 1320 which is too low. After setting it to 1500 the network works well.
Re: It has arrived
brudermarkus wrote on Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:48
About the vim/escape key thing: Just swap the caps lock and the escape key! http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=166
Re: It has arrived
koolguynet wrote on Thu, 02 Feb 2006 20:09
Have you been able to test the 3d acceleration yet? I am curious if it works. I have a T41 and the acceleration works but messes up the suspend to ram/disk. Thanks!
Re: Re: It has arrived
Boudewijn Rempt wrote on Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:31
Today I installed the latest ATI drivers, and 3d acceleration and suspend work fine. I followed the tutorial at: http://www.ailis.de/~k/docs/atilinux/, and it worked perfectly.
Re: It has arrived
Michael Maclean wrote on Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:57
I've had Ubuntu on my z60m for a while. It's nice. There are a couple of bugs with Network Manager but I'm not convinced that's not my wireless router. I haven't tried the fingerprint reader at all yet, but everything else seems to be fine aside from the SD card reader which needs the kernel module reinserted every time I plug a card in.
Re: Re: It has arrived
Boudewijn Rempt wrote on Mon, 26 Dec 2005 11:30
If the optical drive is on a sata thingy, apparently dma is turned on automatically. And indeed, when looking at the boot messages, the dma mode is turned on for all drives, including the dvd.
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