IBM T42 & 9.3

I'm looking at getting a ThinkPad T42 fairly soon, and putting 9.3 on it. Does anybody here have any advice or knowledge? Will 9.3 support all the laptop functions - power management, WiFi, sound etc?

How memory efficient is 9.3?

I've never used SuSE before, but I'd be very happy to try: one of my colleagues is a very satisfied user, and recommends it highly. But I'm keen for other input, especially as regards laptops.

Thanks,
-A

Welcome to our forums, we hope you stay!

Well, since 9.3 will not release until later on, we have no real factual advice to give you, but with past experiences, IBM computers laptops have one of the best support with SuSE Linux. With the memory question, SuSE uses as much memory as your computer provides, but this does not necessarly mean that your computer will be slow, not at all.

IBM has is one of the best supported by SUSE.

Originally posted by AussieGuy@Apr 9 2005, 03:46 PM
I'm looking at getting a ThinkPad T42 fairly soon, and putting 9.3 on it.* Does anybody here have any advice or knowledge?* Will 9.3 support all the laptop functions - power management, WiFi, sound etc?

I wonder if you've bought your laptop already...

I've got a T42 2378FVU that I use at work, and I'm running SuSE 9.2 Pro on it. I've been basically happy with it, with the understanding that Linux is not nearly as "turnkey" on it as I had hoped. Even given the supposedly wonderful hardware support for Linux by IBM. I have an older Thinkpad at home (600X) running 9.1, and it's much more stable. I guess it just goes to show that the older the hardware, the better Linux will be adapted to it.

That said, I think I can still recommend the T42 for running SuSE (although of course I don't know about 9.3 yet). Power mgt seems to be fine. Suspend-to-disk works, anyway. Certainly don't expect Wifi to run "out of the box" with a simple configuration in YaST! I'm still working on that in spare cycles. I've also had trouble getting it to do dual displays. I'd like to hook it up to an external monitor so that I can have xinerama, but all efforts so far have failed. Finally, and most frustratingly, I've found that USB memory-type devices (stick drives, and my iPod), when plugged in, cause the machine to experience a slow and painful death. My KDE desktop (with IceWM) still responds to mouse and keyboard events, etc, but it seems that no new processes can be started. If you can't start new processes, you can't shut the machine down properly

I'm about to post here about the dual display and USB problems (in separate threads). If you've bought the T42 and are running 9.x on it, I'd like to hear about your experiences.

Dave
Salt Lake City, Utah

I'm running Suse 9.3 pro on my T42 - and it's amazingly fast - Been running the latest Ubuntu up until this weekend when I made the switch.. I'm very impressed and every piece of hardware is supported right out of the box..