Hardware

Getting Linux to work on laptops is still a fiddly business, despite massive improvements in the driver fronts. I own a ThinkPad X61 Tablet and a Lenovo IdeaPad S12.

ThinkWiki had a very excellent set of pages about ThinkPads. Installation was smooth and no proprietary drivers were needed.

I initially installed with Jaunty; I now run Karmic on this machine. I also referred to Luke's page on a slightly different tablet for instructions.

I have a home-cooked setup of scripts (partially stolen from Luke) for screen rotation with the accelerometer. The modified hdaps_ec kernel module that you need can be setup with m-a a-i tp-smapi.

The IdeaPad S12 has a lot of nonstandard hardware; I needed special drivers for both video and wireless. I documented my experiences on ThinkWiki. The webcam works out of the box on Karmic, which is quite nice.