Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

January 29, 2004

Filed under: Uncategorized — Muli Ben-Yehuda @ 6:47 PM

laptop porn. I wonder how well this beastie supports linooks?

4 Comments »

  1. The article is incredibly misleading; You can get all of that stuff on a regular T41, not just a T41p; the T41p just means you get *everything*, including the extended battery and best specs. It’s also the most expensive.
    The Thinkpad T41 runs Linux very well, as would be expected from a long line of standards-compliant IBM laptops. Pretty much everything is supported – USB, network, video, sound, most wireless options, video out, even the modem. Some require a bit more effort than others to get set up, but a quick search on google for the T40/T41 should make it simpler.
    The only complaint I have is battery life and ACPI support. ACPI itself seems to get recognized and everything, I can get temperatures and battery percentage / ETA, power info, SpeedStep controlling through cpudynd, etc. Even suspending works very well. But the problem is that returning from suspend, even on the latest 2.6 kernels, loses ACPI interrupts and seems to break the built-in Ethernet after a couple of minutes, making suspending pretty useless. Hopefully this’ll be fixed soon, there are already a few open bugs in the kernel Bugzilla about it.
    Battery life is also kind of disappointing – with full display use, I only get about 2 1/2 hours on the standard battery under Linux, where I’ve heard people get 4-5 hours under Windows. Supposedly even the power usage (in watts) is higher under Linux, which is surprising considering Linux has traditionally been far less power-hungry than Windows. It probably has something to do with the new Centrino stuff not being fully supported. I’m not really sure this issue is being worked on, though I should hope that Intel and/or IBM will help resolve this in the future.

    Comment by compwiz — January 29, 2004 @ 9:53 AM | Reply

    • Thank you for the detailed comment! as you might or might not know, I work at IBM, and my laptop (a trusty but aging T21) is due for upgrade sometime in the future. I hope I’ll be lucky enough to get a T41(p).
      As for the power usage, did you try playing with 2.6’s cpufrequency support to try and minimize your power consumption? laptop mode which recently went in might help as well. Also, draining and recharging the battery a few times in a row usually does wonder for it.

      Comment by mulix — January 29, 2004 @ 9:59 AM | Reply

      • Yeah, I noticed you do work at IBM.. I should hope that if you do get a new laptop, you’ll help with the kernel hacking part of getting stuff working 🙂
        Yup.. cpufrequency with cpudynd & the speedstep_centrino module. I haven’t tried cpufreqd, though I doubt it would make much of a difference. I haven’t watched the CPU states closely, but my CPU seems to be in the lower state (600 MHz) most of the time.. Other than that, I’m still searching for a way to squeeze the battery life out of this thing. I’m usually pretty good about draining & recharging the battery pretty frequently, but that only affects the battery meter on Li-Ion batteries anyway – the actual battery life doesn’t have a “memory” effect.
        The linux-thinkpad mailing list is chock-full of enlightened end users, but unfortunately there aren’t enough kernel developers or highly involved users there to actually get answers to some of the tougher questions regarding battery life and such.

        Comment by compwiz — January 29, 2004 @ 10:04 AM

      • > Yeah, I noticed you do work at IBM.. I should hope that if you do get a
        > new laptop, you’ll help with the kernel hacking part of getting stuff
        > working 🙂
        Granted, that’s half the fun with new hardware (the other half being the fact that it actually works)
        > The linux-thinkpad mailing list is chock-full of enlightened end users,
        > but unfortunately there aren’t enough kernel developers or highly
        > involved users there to actually get answers to some of the tougher
        > questions regarding battery life and such.
        I used to lurk there many moons ago. I’ll join again, it’s not like I get enough mail anyway 😉

        Comment by mulix — January 31, 2004 @ 1:41 AM


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