Lenovo T500 (shiny new laptop)
Yesterday I exchanged my “old” Thinkpad T60 with a shiny new T500. This time I ordered a Thinkpad with integrated Intel graphics since it’s supposed to be way better supported than the graphic chips from ATI or NVIDIA under Linux. And of course it is supposed to be much more silent.
I don’t regret this decision so far, the new T500 is barely hearable even under heavy load.
Debian
I installed Debian unstable (aka. frozen for waaayy to long) without a problem. Sound worked out of the box, graphics worked somewhat. The kernel automatically loaded the correct modules but I had to tell Xorg that I want the “intel” driver instead of Vesa. Unfortunately Xorg’s intel driver in unstable is already too old to allow me to use an external monitor via the docking station’s DVI port, so I had to to upgrade to Xorg from experimental, which is not very cool since this is the machine I depend on at work.
Wifi also doesn’t work, since the the driver and firmware available in unstable are outdated. Suspend to RAM works sometimes, but most of the time the laptop refuses to wake up properly so I have to shut it down.
I’ve not yet tested if bluetooth and Wimax works.
So currently the T500 is usable under unstable but without external monitor and without Wifi. If you are brave enough to use packages from experimental, you get your external monitor to work but still don’t have Wifi. Suspend to RAM does not work reliably.
The T500 should probably work fine with Lenny but of course without external Monitor and Wifi support.
Vista
After I’ve installed Debian and moved my /home from the old laptop to my new baby, I noticed that silly “Windows Vista” sticker on my laptop. Of course I tried to remove that thing, which I regretted painfully.
After I’ve successfully removed the sticker — which was surprisingly hard — some glue remained on the surface of the laptop. No problem I thought, nothing some nail polish remover can’t handle. Unfortunately it only smeared the glue but did not resolve it as I had expected. So I’ve tried perfume, water, soap, rubber, tape and solvent for several hours, but was not able to remove the glue at all. All I achieved was to smear the compact but thick chunk of glue to a very thin but much more distributed layer of this nasty glue on my laptop. Now it looks like a 5×5cm square of dirt on top of my laptop — not sure if removing the Vista sticker was worth it.
Tags: debian
November 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
You should try vegetable oil to remove the glue, then denatured alcohol to remove the oil.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
It was totally worth it- the goo will come off though, you just have to clean it a bit more.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Can you tell us the exact model of your ThinkPad, and especially the wireless chip used therein? I’m planning to buy a T400…
November 25th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I’ve had these stickers on several laptops including my current Lenovo T61. The trick is to not remove the sticker but to scrape off the top colored level with your fingernail or some such. You will be left with a cool silver mirrored sticker.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Baby oil or mineral oil works very well at removing glue and such
November 25th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
The way I usually handle those metallic stickers is to use my Leatherman to pull a corner up, then grab the upended corner with the pliers and pull. The whole sticker comes up easily with a single loud pop or snap, leaving no residue, and if you’re careful and keep a sharp knife, no scratch.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
You can always get a Debian vinyl sticker of about the same size ant put it there ;^)
November 25th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
If you have an Intel wifi card that requires the iwlagn driver, just install the latest Debian kernel package from http://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel .
November 25th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I have a T400 with identical internal hardware and I’m also running experimental.
First, I pulled my Vista sticker off with the `letherman` method when I received this laptop 2 months ago and it came right off as described.
Second, I have Intel graphics working beautifully. In experimental, uninstall the Intel graphics driver (leaving vesa to satisfy the xorg driver dep.), install glx-dev and libdrm-dev, and ‘git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel’ and switch to the 2.5 stable branch. 2.5 stable will build against libdrm in experimental. Be sure to set the prefix to /usr/ so Xorg will find the intel driver.
VGA, SVideo, HDMI-1, HDMI-2 and LVDS all work with 2.5 driver.
Finally, for wireless, just download the microcode from intellinuxwireless.org and drop it in /lib/firmware and build and install 2.6.27.7.
Incidentally, 2.6.27.7 will suspend and resume reliably.
Enjoy!
November 25th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Here’s more sticker advice, and this will be especially useless: With those foil stickers I’ve found that the sticker itself can be used to pick up the remaining glue.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
According to the guys at thinkwiki the problem with suspend/resume is one of concurrency in the intel video driver:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Ubuntu_8.10_(Intrepid_Ibex)_on_a_Thinkpad_T400#Suspend.2FHibernate
They provide a workaround: disable one cpu before suspend and restore after resume
November 25th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Just use a bit of Gazoline. It has the property to remove every kind of glue.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Is it possible to buy this laptop without Vista and without the MS tax?
November 26th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Hey, congrats on the T500, the glue should come off right quick with a little WD40,…. Wish Vista would dissolve so easily..
Every time I buy a new machine, it’s Load Debian right away..too bad Microsuck gets credit for it.
Debian Rocks.
-JS
November 26th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
try denatured alcohol that worked for me.
T60 isn’t old
November 26th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
believe I used toothpaste to remove the gunk from mine.. worked very well iirc.
November 26th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
My Gateway had that same sticker =)
The way to get the glue off that worked for me was to spray some aerosol deodorant on it, wait a bit, then wipe it off. I did it twice, and now you can’t even see where it was.
Found the tip on the ‘net somewhere…
Good luck!
November 28th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I was successful in ordering and paying for a T400 without the OS, but Lenovo goofed and put a licensed Vista on it anyway.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I have found a trick to make the core (2) duos suspend more reliably. This works on my T61p and macbook. Basically if you use powersave to disable one of the cores, and clock the cpu down with powersave mode it will suspend, and wake up ever time. And do in much faster than before. I just wrote a script that ran when I closed the lid to disable these, and then re-enable the core, and put it back in ondemand mode.
Works for me, good luck!
December 30th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Lenovo is mediocre hardware. Vista is a POJ. Together, they are a perfect recipe for a doorstop, as that is all my T500 is good for.