Linux on an IBM ThinkPad X24

I bought a ThinkPad X24 from the cheap ThinkPad shop on Tottenham Court Road (Shyamtronics, in case you don't know about it - you can normally barter their advertised prices down a bit.) By and large it works very well; these are some slightly haphazard notes about what does and doesn't. There are similar pages linked from the Linux on Laptops website.

The X24 ThinkPads currently (autumn 2005) go for about £250 on eBay. This is a pretty good deal, I reckon, although you should probably factor in the cost of getting a usable amount of memory for it and a larger disk now that the prices of disks have dropped so much. Also, the lack of USB 2 is pretty irritating if you have to use removable storage a lot.

On the whole, I'm very happy with this laptop. It has the usual good build quality of IBM's ThinkPads and the hardware has excellent Linux support. In addition, it's small enough that I'm happy to carry it around with me, and the battery life is excellent. However, I have had to send it back twice for repair, in both cases since because the video hardware on the main board stopped working. These were both covered by the three year warranty, but it was very annoying being without a laptop while they fixed it, of course. In addition it was much more difficult than it should have been to persuade IBM to fix it, since by that stage I'd removed Windows and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it. The next time I get a laptop I'm going to make sure of the following things:

I'm only going to buy a new laptop if it comes with a three year warranty
I will remove the installed hard disk immediately when I get the laptop home and replace it with a brand new one to install Linux on. You can probably get a higher capacity disk for not much money and in the case of any hardware failure you can avoid all the awkwardness with persuading them that it's not just a Linux fault by swapping the disks back over.

At one stage I had terrible problems with the laptop not being able to regulate its temperature; during tasks that used a lot of CPU the temperature reported by acpi -V would keep going up and up until it shut itself down at 92℃. However, after the most recent repair this seems to no longer be a problem.

Repartitioning

For my initial installation, I kept the original copy of Windows XP and preserved the recovery partition. I shrank the NTFS partition with Partition Magic, although nowadays the NTFS resizing in GNU Parted (as included in recent Debian install CDs) works well enough that I'd have no need for Partition Magic.

Once it became clear that Linux worked fine for me on the X24, I thought that the only needed Windows for the occasional BIOS update, but of course with the options of using PXE or building a DOS boot CD with the BIOS update software on it that reason didn't apply, so I ended up repartitioning it so that only Linux remained on the disk:

Debian Installation

You need to use the idepci flavour of boot CD or the system hangs on boot. I did a network installation over ethernet, which worked fine. I used the old eepro100 module, rather than the Intel e100 module - as far as I recall, they both work fine, though.

Kernel Configuration

Sound

Sound works fine with the ALSA driver selected with CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0 in the kernel.

InfraRed

I've never bothered trying to get the infrared module to work, since I just use a USB Bluetooth dongle for talking to my mobile.

Power Management

I'm using ACPI in preference to APM. Suspend to RAM works fine for me with a short script that just shuts down the wireless before suspending:

The laptop unsuspends when you next open the lid. One possible source of concern is that although most of the ACPI devices you'd expect are detected:

Wireless Support

The built-in Prism 2.5 based 802.11b device works reasonably well with the kernel's orinoco_pci module. However, it won't let you scan for access points with iwlist:

... and had other strange foibles, like refusing to turn off WEP once it had been enabled for the interface. Those were both very irritating, of course, so I switched to using the prism2_pci module from the linux-wlan-ng project. I have some simple scripts that scan for access points, join networks and so on - that all works very well now.

Graphics and XFree86 Configuration

The XFree86 works fine using the Debian xserver-xfree86 (4.2.1) package with the radeon driver:

mplayer runs well with xvidix video output, though you have to be root for it to work.

Modem

Getting the built-in modem to work was a rather painful experience, unfortunately, in that I had to try many different third party drivers before finding one that worked. What you want are the slamr module and slmodemd daemon from SmartLink's slmodem-2.9.4 package. The modem appears as /dev/ttySL0.

Docking Station and DVD

I also bought the Ultrabase X2 Media Slice (i.e. a docking station) and a DVD drive to go into it. I was pleased to discover that mplayer, xine and ogle could all play DVDs quite happily once I'd remembered to turn on DMA for the DVD drive.

I haven't yet figured out how to get the notebook to happily dock into the media slice and notice the DVD drive. If I suspend the notebook first, I can add or remove the slice (which is useful since it has better speakers than the built-in one) but unless the notebook was booted with the DVD drive attached, it doesn't get picked up. I guess this just needs a bit more research on my part...

lspci -v

In case it's of use to anyone who's thinking of buying one of these machines and wants to know exactly what hardware is in there, this is the result of lspci -v: