Intrepid Blog

I’ve been the lucky owner of a Thinkpad X61s for a bit more than a week now. It’s a light and small 12.1 inch notebook. It’s structurally very solid and has got almost the same full size keyboard as my 14.1inch T60. (The enter, tab, shift and alike keys are shortened in width).

The installation of Gentoo went quite smooth. For those interested the xorg.conf, make.conf and kernel .config I use.

Internal mic/speaker and external jacks; video; DRI and AIGLX; USB; PCMCIA; wireless; fingerprint reader and ethernet all seem to work just fine. I haven’t tested the firewire, ssd slot, bluetooth and n-capabilities of the wireless yet.

In comparison with my T60 the volume and the backlight buttons aren’t hardware controlled. Gnome recognizes the volume buttons, but not the backlight ones. I’m still working on those.

By accident, I discovered that my thinkpad has got an internal microphone. Now I can get rid of that stupid headset I have to use for skype.

(Yeah, I know macBook’s have got a camera too)

I hacked together this little ruby script to read the G-measuring device in the Thinkpad’s harddisk (HDAPS) and rotate the desktop cube of Beryl when sudden movement occurs. A bit like what has been done for the MacBook already.

http://w-nz.com/~darkshines/projects/rtollina.rb

GPL, obviously. It’s not really perfect yet. I’ll try to improve it tomorrow and add support for compiz and maybe even make a little widget out of it.

It’s based on code by Fer, which is for Compiz instead of Beryl.

After 2 days installing gentoo on my great T60 I’ve accomplished quite a lot so far:

• WiFi works. 4 seperate components (userland, firmware, kernel module and yet another kernel module) increase complexity a bit. Although the fifth component caused trouble — I forgot to tweak conf.d/net
• Radeon X1400 and video card worked almost directly after using aticonf — nice! When I upgraded to xorg-server-1.1, though, I got a few crashes when closing X in a not-so-nice manner.
• Using the synaptics drivers my touchpad now support drag’n'drop, right and middle mouse click and scrolling emulation. Still got to find a way to bind the thinkpad shortcut to disable/enable the point or pad.
• Finally got the DVD rewriter to work. It seems I overlooked one little stupid generic E-IDE option in the kernel config.
• Bluetooth and infrared should work — haven’t got the gadgets to try them out
• Never even saw a PCCard, so didn’t even bother to look into ti
• Software suspend (hibernation) doens’t work yet, but I definitely be working on that.

I just received the Thinkpad T60 notebook I ordered last week from nofost.de. And I’m thrilled!

I’ve been busy all day installing gentoo on the beauty (and removing the ugly windows sticker).

Some nice pictures: