Lenovo 3000 N100 Laptop with Debian Lenny

[Lavene]

We took the plunge and ordered two new Lenovo 300 laptops. They came with Vista of course but I instantly got rid of it and installed Debian Lenny keeping only the 5 gig recovery partition (just in case a situation occur where I have to return it).
Lenny installed without issues using the net install (wired network) and with the 2.6.22-3-k7 kernel it's lighting fast. Finally, setting up the wireless interface was a breeze.

The only 'snag' I ran into was the first time I ran the installer in normal mode and it failed to pick the right graphics card (Nvidia Gforce). Running in 'expert' and selecting the 'nv' driver avoided this.

The Lenovo is absolute a laptop suitable for Linux.

Tina

[fos]

That is great news Tina. Thinkpads always had the best quality available.

How does Lenovo stack up to the old IBM standards?

fos

[Lavene]

That is great news Tina. Thinkpads always had the best quality available.

How does Lenovo stack up to the old IBM standards?

fos

Actually I spoke too soon. There is a problem with the sound card (82801G) and Alsa and I've been unable to find a solution for it. The problem is that although there is sound it's not possible to adjust the volume and the system seem only aware of the headphone output which it for some reason routs to the main speakers.

However, I have played around with OSS (http://www.opensound.com/) and with some fiddling it works pretty well. It's not as well supported as Alsa yet (especially not in KDE) but I think this is mainly because it's just a few months since it went open source.

Despite the sound problem, which is hardly the machine's fault, I really like it. It feels kinda cheaper than the good old IBM machines though, but then again it *is* cheaper ;)

Tina

[Lavene]

Just an update on the sound problem: I got OSS working, sort of, but the sound quality was really bad so I dropped it and went back to the Alsa problem. I fixed it by building the Alsa driver from the source package in Debian unstable. With module-assistant it was a breeze. Sound now works perfectly.

[jml]

Its nice to see that Lenovo is still turning out Linux friendly hardware. Oh, and Frank, Lenovo has two distinct lines of laptops. The ThinkPad line is the one they purchased from IBM and is "designed" to be the more rugged Corporate hardware. The 3000 N100 line is marketed as a consumer oriented laptop. It has slightly more modern hardware than the ThinkPad which may explain Tina's problem with the sound card. And its built a bit less ruggedly than the ThinkPad. But as Tina says, it cost a lot less as well.

Joe