Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

Jeremy Zawodny reports good results running Ubuntu Linux on his Thinkpad T43P.

I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 “live” CD and ran the installer. I then rebooted the notebook and found that it detected my wireless interface just fine. The screen was properly detected at 1600×1200, the sound worked, and the TrackPad worked fine.

Then came the real test. I decided to exercise the power management features. Suspend to disk (hibernate) and suspend to RAM (suspend) worked. In both cases, it worked as well as in Windows (better in some ways) and nearly as good as a Powerbook.

I cannot overstate how important this is: Ubuntu is the first real “desktop” Linux I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of polish to it, most of the “right” things have been hidden from non-Linux geeks, and it just works.

I’ve been reading positive reviews of Ubuntu on notebooks for a while, and actually have a partition on my Thinkpad reserved for running Linux from when I originally set up the system last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to chase down power management and driver problems, which has kept me away from doing anything with it. Sounds like the current Ubuntu works pretty well for notebooks, or at least Thinkpads.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 6:50 am and is filed under linux, sysadmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.