title: Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T61 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/ubuntu-on-a-thinkpad-t61/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 417 created: 2008/12/23 22:32:44 created_gmt: 2008/12/23 22:32:44 comment_status: open post_name: ubuntu-on-a-thinkpad-t61 status: publish post_type: post

Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T61

Just installed Hard Heron (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) on my work Thinkpad T61. Pretty much everything worked out of the box. Since I chose to install the x86_64 version I also had to install and configure 32-bit Firefox, and do the usual tap dance with VMware Server, but it’s all working now. There was literally no special config that was needed for the hardware, except for accepting installation of the proprietary nVidia driver for the onboard graphics card (an nVidia Quadro 140M). This is needed for 3D effects that are still unsupported by the open source x.org driver.

This machine is mostly a host for a Windows XP virtual machine that I use to connect to the company network and run all those non-free (really non-free, as in obscenely expensive and closed source to boot) applications we run.

There’s a couple of reasons I did this. First, because relying on a couple of one-man show third party repositories for most of the desktop software I used under Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS really is kind of precarious — especially when the same stuff is available from the official Ubuntu repositories.

Second, going full immersion with Ubuntu requires that I have something to practice on while at work A big part of the next phase for me will be learning how to get all of the stuff I had working on RHEL to run on Ubuntu.

Always learning, as an old friend used to say.

UPDATE: After running with 8.04 on the laptop for a few days I reinstalled with 8.10 to keep it consistent with my desktop at home, and in the hopes of solving the usb device detection issue (that finally manifested itself when I tried connecting my Palm through to my Win XP vm). So far the only big issue I had was being unable to log out as one user and in as another without crashing the X server. The temporary workaround for this bug is to roll back the proprietary nVidia driver from the latest version, 177, to 173.

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