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My old Thinkpad A20p was four and a half years old, and I was getting sick of shuttling PC Cards and dongles for connectivity. And in the process of giving my wife's folks a wireless network, we gave away both Orinoco Silver cards we had around, and I didn't have any wireless connectivity. I was stuck with an old 3com 3c575, and 3com's discontinued the dongles!
It was time for a change. Fortunately, I've got a friend who works for IBM and could get me a Friends and Family discount. A few grand later, a Thinkpad T42p was mine!
This machine is one of the fastest laptops available. 2.1GHz Pentium M CPU, came with 1GB of memory (the second gig is on the way from Crucial), a 7200RPM hard drive, and the standard flawless IBM engineering. And a cute little fingerprint reader, which lets you log in without a password in Windows.
The moment it arrived, I started burning Fedora to DVD with the included DVD burner. Nope, not Debian. I've decided that my usage patterns right now fit more with Fedora than Debian. It's nice to have almost the entire free software world packaged by Debian, but I was still running self-compiled and managed software for all my main needs, and I wanted a base system that could release more often. Maybe Fedora doesn't get as stable as Debian Stable, but it's better than Debian Unstable.
After everything was burned, ntfsresize made quick work of shrinking my XP partition down to size. Then booted Fedora from DVD. I have to say, installing Linux on a laptop is a whole lot easier than it used to be. After about 10 minutes, I had a working dual-boot system, including X, sound, and ethernet. All I had to do was copy my home and /usr/local from the old laptop and recompile a few things (newer libc, I think).
Naturally, the base install didn't take care of everything for me. I had to grab the madwifi drivers to get my built-in wireless to work. It compiled easily, but didn't immediately see any access points? It took almost 20 minutes for me to figure it out! (Like I said, things are a lot easier than they used to be!)
Seems it's a known problem that the madwifi drivers have problem with ad-hoc mode. And I'd left the card configured for auto-detection of ad-hoc or managed use. Once I switched the mode to Managed, it found my AP and worked fine. WEP, configured via Fedora's network dialog, worked without a hitch. I still want to install wpa_supplicant so it can automatically use the right keys, but that can come later.
The other thing which wasn't configured out of the box is suspend/resume. Fedora defaults to ACPI power management, which seems to be fine on my laptop, but while they include acpid, they don't wire up anything for suspending. There are plenty of sites on the net saying how to do this for a T42, so I'll probably work on that tomorrow.
Have to say, this will be a great Linux box. It's fast, has a huge screen on which subpixel antialiasing is gorgeous, and feels great to use. Thanks for letting me get it, Amy!