# Laptops: Thinkpad T41 or Other?

## Ian

Ok, so I'm a senior in high school, and this summer I'm going to be getting me a laptop.  I know it's a bit soon to start looking, because the market will be entirely different by then, but I've been looking at the IBM Thinkpad T41, and it seems to be a pretty good laptop, having everything I want.

My question, is it a good deal, and does Linux run more or less flawlessly on it?  I've seen good reports for the T40, but not much about the T41.

Lastly, if the T41 isn't a good notebook, what would you suggest I look at?  I just need a long battery life (4 hours minimum), decent resolution (1400x1050), and medium sized screen (at least 14").

And I know this has been asked before, but I only found one thread when I searched for Thinkpad T41, so don't yell at me for not searching :-p.

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## Hypnos

The T41 is not immune from hardware configuration issues plaguing other laptops; specifically, power management (ACPI, APM), the Radeon graphics chipset (getting ATI drivers to play nice), and the Cisco Aironet mini-PCI wireless chipset (flaky OSS driver, recalcitrant Cisco driver, Centrino wireless not supported).

I suggest searching for "Thinkpad" and "ATI", "Cisco" or "ACPI".

Nevertheless, the T41 is the one laptop I most desire!

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## Ian

Hmm, random, that was my 600th post, whee.

Back on topic.

I've heard from a friend with a T40, that the Cisco card works without too many problems.  I'll have to ask him about the ATI drivers and power management, but I know he loves his laptop, and I'm going to assume that the T41 can only be better :-p.

Anyone else have anything to offer?

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## Fuzzster

G'day there people...

I am also considering the T41 as a laptop for my studies and plan on using gentoo on it.

What I wanted to say was that as far as I can tell, the only difference between the T40 and T41 is the fancy hard drive drop protection thingy that the T41 has and T40 doesn't (there is no support for this feature in linux from what I have read).  All the rest - CPU, Chipset, etc. - is the same.  This means that installation instructions for the T40's apply to the T41 (correct me if I'm wrong anyone).  Of course there is a fair ammount of variation within the T series notebooks anyway mainly in terms of video card and wireless configs. 

Other useful info about the use of Linux on IBM notebooks can be found at 

http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad

Have fun!

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## renihs

hi !

i am quite new to gentoo (~4 days), coming from slackware. I am using an ibm t41. i did a stage1 install with make conf -march=pentium3 (since i only had a stable kernel 2.6.2 on slackware with pentium3 (not 4)). i also downloaded kernel 2.6.2 from kernel org (kernel 2.6.3 wont run, at least for me, on the t41...ati radeon bugs).worked pretty fine except some errors after emerging xfree86 complaining about ati radeon drivers not to be working; i should get xfree86-drm ...which also complained it didnt want to install with kernel 2.6). anyhow i adapted my old xfree86 config and it works fine. except hardware acceleration seems not to work (slaggy pymol and other stuff). still i didnt spend much time trying to fix this so far. 

also the intel wireless card works fine (using ndiswrapper and the windows driver, .sys & inf)

sound & lan no problem. 

acpi, speed stepping etc also works fine (at least in 2.6.2)

btw  :Smile: , so far gentoo looks great!

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## Hypnos

"-march=pentium4" seems to work nicely with the newest stable versions of gcc.

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## renihs

hi

hmm i didnt dare to try back then, hmm dunno how much perfomance increase this would/could get. pentiumM isnt really a pentium4 but dunno  :Smile: 

do you think its worth recompiling entire stage?

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## Hypnos

 *renihs wrote:*   

> hi
> 
> hmm i didnt dare to try back then, hmm dunno how much perfomance increase this would/could get. pentiumM isnt really a pentium4 but dunno 

 

It add SSE2 support and slightly different scheduling.  Maybe makes a little difference if you set "-mfpmath=sse".

 *Quote:*   

> do you think its worth recompiling entire stage?

 

Hell no!  Just FYI, for future merging ...

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## renihs

hehe ok  :Smile: 

thx alot, i will add -mfpmath=sse to my make.conf.

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## geta

just for the records:

I've bought a T41 and did a stage3 installation with the pentium4 image (Gentoo 2004.0). No problems up to now.

From what I can see, most software still compiles with -march=pentium3 after doing its own configure (which is the case with most software in the gentoo tree). But checking out the kernel (I'm running 2.6.5 vanilla) leads to the conclusion that Pentium M and Pentium 4 are made of the same stuff.

Greets,

geta

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