T61 and Linux
So after quite a bit time playing around with my T61 and Gentoo I’m really surprised that there are actually so less problems. I admit that you have to use very often bleeding edge drivers (i.e. to get sound under ALSA working), but hey thats brand new hardware! And the awesome documentation on the Gentoo Wiki about the T61 and ThinkWiki helped a lot to get most of the things running. I just can encourage everybody who has a Thinkpad (preferable a T61) to contribute his experiences to this two projects in order to get a even better Linux support on this notebook. There are still some unsolved issues about suspend/hibernation, the APS, Nvidia Drivers and some other minor stuff. But nothing to big, so we can hope to get them solved in a few weeks/months.
But apparently Linux has a issue with SATA performance under x86_64 (link1, link2), which is quite annoying and I’m thinking about switching back to i386 and see how it looks there…
