Lenovo ThinkPad X61s and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
Published November 7th, 2007 in MiscellaneousI just bought myself the fine ultraportable laptop, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X61s. Hardware-wise, this is an excellent laptop. I like the form factor with 12.1″ XGA screen. For wordprocessing and web-browsing, XGA suits the portrait page better than WXGA. 1024×768 resolution is perfectly fine for something that is going to sit right on your lap. It’s extremely light and with the 8-cell battery I bought with it, I can get amazing battery time. I had a question mark over performance, though. The reason? Windows Vista.
The laptop I got comes with 1.6GHz Centrino Duo and 1GB of RAM. I was extremely disappointed by the performance of Vista. Sure, it has a few bells and whistles, but I saw very little productivity gain from the extra features over XP. This was my first experience of Vista and I was very disappointed. I was never a great fan of XP, but I remember when I bought my ThinkPad T20 back in 2000 (still going strong, by the way, with CentOS 4 on it), that the performance of XP was very good. Booting up was very fast. I was amazed at just how slow my X61 was in booting up Vista.
After a week of frustration, issues with Firefox, intermittent crashing of OpenOffice, annoying popups, trial software I did not want, mysterious disappearance of disk space, and performance that just plain sucked, I decided I had to look for a Linux solution. I had every confidence that installing Linux, even with all the bells and whistles it has to offer, would perform very well. After some research I chose Ubuntu Linux 7.10 - a.k.a. Gutsy Gibbon. An alternative I might have considered is Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED10), which has good support for the T61 (this has a different chipset than the Intel Santa-Rosa in my X61s, as far as I am aware). But, the problem with an enterprise product is that, cost aside, functional updates are very slow in arriving. Also, for those little hacks to get DivX, AVI, MediaPlayer streaming, etc, working, Ubuntu is second-to-none.
I decided I would hang-on to Vista for now and dual boot my system. The 120GB hardrive allowed for this. I followed the instructions in this wiki: Dual_boot_Vista_and_Gutsy_on_Thinkpad_x61s
An issue I had with Vista is that my system was saying there was 38GB of disk space used, but I could account for only 1/3 of that. I honestly do not know where the rest of the disk space went. I decided to resize the Vista partition to 50GB. That was tight to leave it running with just 12GB free, so I created a 30GB FAT32 partition (/share) to share between Ubuntu and Vista, as required. I created another 25GB root partition using ext3 filesystem, a 2GB swap partition and 200MB boot partition. A general rule of thumb is that Linux will use only 50% of the resources of Windows. So, I could easily survive with 25GB versus 50GB. I could also be confident that Linux would use 50% of the memory. In Vista I was constantly up at 80% of physical RAM being used. So, how much would Ubuntu use?
I was amazed at how long the resizing and partitioning took. It took almost a full day to complete!
I should also point out how I managed to run the downloaded CD images. I have an XBOX 360 for which I bought the HD-DVD player for 200 Euro. I tried this with the X61s using one of the USB ports and it worked straight away. This is good because I don’t need the docking station and I didn’t want to buy another external CD-ROM drive. Who knows… maybe there will eventually be support for HD-DVD in Linux using this drive.
I booted up the Ubuntu Live CD and found that even running from the CD, Ubuntu 7.10’s performance was comparable to Vista. That speaks volumes about how bad Vista is with 1GB of RAM. Not that 2GB of RAM would have made much difference. Just about everything that was important worked right away - wireless, the keyboard light, sleep functionality, sound, graphics, etc. A couple of things I’m not too bothered about, like the fingerprint reader. That would be nice, but I would have bought the X61s with or without it, so no big deal.
I proceded to install and it went very quickly and very smoothly. Very little interaction required. Within a short period of time I rebooted into my new Ubuntu 7.10 installation and I was really pleased with performance. It is lightening fast. I haven’t timed the boot times, but I think Ubuntu is at least twice as fast. Within a few minutes I had DivX, AVI, Windows Media streaming, etc, working. MP4 / Quicktime was a bit jittery, but it was actually better than in Vista. I haven’t tried out any of the fancy graphical features in Gnome, and I don’t even know if they work, but if they don’t, I’m pretty sure support or workarounds will arrive soon.
One issue I have read about is the heat that builds up under the right palm area above the wireless circuitry. It gets very warm, but it’s not that bad - some I have read about seem to think it’s more uncomfortable than that. The chipset is very new, so I’m quite sure these things will be ironed out.
I took a look at the physical memory usage and, sure enough, it was at just over 40%. Last week I was considering upgrading my RAM, but now I won’t bother.
So… my verdict? If you have an X61, do not have any fears about Ubuntu 7.10. You should have what you need working right off the bat. And other minor things will be resolved in time, I’m sure.
Technorati Tags: thinkpad, ubuntu, linux, vista, ultraportable
7 Responses to “Lenovo ThinkPad X61s and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon”
- 1 Pingback on Nov 8th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I have been using Gutsy 7.10 on Thinkpad X61s for a couple weeks now. I run into these problems:
1. Wireless card may go dead after idling for awhile (Intel 4965)
2. Got blank screen after putting to suspension. Ctrl Alt F1 then F7 works some time.
3. The palm rest area around the fingerprint is extremely warm (not happening in Windows)
4. Fingerprint is not working out of box (I read Thinkkiwi for thinkfinger, but still doesn’t work)
5 Sound may not corresponding to Thinkpad volume keys (google for the work around solution).
6. I cannot play some embedded online music (Youtube is okay).
7. Wifi LED is not showing.
Those are the issues that I can think of off my head now. I hope these issues can be resolved soon with.
Definitely issues with suspending the laptop. Works sometimes and not others. I have seen the wireless card stop working also. Have to go into the network settings and untick then tick the box next to my wireless connection to restart it.
Another slight issue is when you go to battery power and the backlight dims. If you brighten it manually, a few seconds later, it will dim automatically back to the power save setting. To get it brighter, you have to lower the percentage dimming in the power management preferences.
If the Wifi LED is the one on furthest left, then mine is working. It blinks when acquiring its ip address, then stays on full-time when established.
These don’t make Ubuntu unusable for me, but they are a bit of an annoyance. But weighing it up against the performance of Vista, I’ll stick with Ubuntu for the most part and hope to get those issues resolved.
Compiz is mostly working from me. In the file /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager, I just added the line:
SKIP_CHECKS=yes
I installed the packages compiz-fusion-plugins-main and compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects shows all the fancy desktop and wndow options such as wobbly windows, cube rotation, etc. The majority of these work fine. There are issues with a few, such as minimize effects which leaves some artifacts on the desktop.
Vista doesn’t come close in the desktop effects department IMHO.
Ugh, *lots* of problems with this laptop and Ubuntu.
The only idiot-me one was not realizing the WLAN card had an external switch to “turn it on”, just below the front of the keyboard (it looks like the latch that opens the laptop). Once that was flipped, wireless reception improved (it was working before, but dying all the time), and bluetooth stopped dying, but wireless reception and reliability is still far below what it was with the X40 and what Apple laptops can get.
Otherwise, things that still don’t work, even with the 1.08 BIOS rev that required windows to update:
suspend - getting that dreaded “inu” in yellow that others have. No combination of kernel flags appeared to make a difference, nor did uswsusp. But as others reported, diddling with cntrl-alt-F1 and F7 a bunch (in no discernable pattern) appears to bring it back, so far each time I’ve tried. Still a long way from the reliable suspending that the X40 had.
external video - again, something that worked out of the box on the X40 but not at all here. Looks like the “intel” video driver doesn’t know how to use a second screen yet? I tried using the “i810″ one but it would often leave the laptop in a bad state, downgrading to 640×480 and reverting the driver to “vesa”. All I want is to mirror the LCD to the video out, not even any Xinerama fanciness, but no deal. Anyone else?
I’ve got a USB thumb drive that isn’t recognized in the USB ports on the right hand side, only the one on the left. odd.
I’m considering downconverting to an X40 so this can become a machine usable for travelling and presenting again.
Brian
There must be some patch to the system. I can feel the system is a lot cooler now than before. There was a couple of updates, so I’m not sure if those fix the warm palm issue. It can be put to suspension, but after CTRL ALT F1 then F7, the wireless message and needed to restart the computer.
I have been opening and closing the lid a lot recently and it works every time, suspending and un-suspending. USB devices work on the right- and left-hand sides. The only annoyance I have now is that the wireless does not come back up when the lid is opened, but it just takes a few seconds to enter the password and uncheck / re-check the box next to the wireless connection.
I have yet to try the external display option. I have a Sony TV that takes VGA directly, so I’ll test that.
With Compiz working and almost everything else (and maybe more soon via patches), Ubuntu on the X61 has exceeded my expectations.