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The n‘th laptop computer. It seems they don’t like me - either there are things falling onto it from the shelf, it simply stops working all of a sudden, I hit a doorframe with it or - as it happened a few weeks ago - it is stolen. I liked my Z61m - it had everything I needed and naturally, I set out to get me a new one (or at least the recent successor version). Unfortunately, IBM / Lenovo isn’t shipping the Thinkpad Z-series anymore and so I settled with the new R61 (model no. NF26VGE).

What it’s got:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0 Ghz)
• 1 GB RAM
• WSXGA 15,4″ (widescreen)
• 128 MB DDR RAM nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M GPU
• Intel Pro 4965ABG wireless
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Bluetooth
• 120 GB SATA hard disk
• Fingerprint scanner, SDCard reader and all that jazz (haven’t tried those yet)

It also came with Windows Vista, but it won’t be used anyway.

Installation, success stories and drawbacks

The SATA controller runs in AHCI mode per default but unfortunately, F7 doesn’t recognize the harddisk and the DVD drive that way. I set the SATA controller mode to compatible and everything worked fine. The installation was completed in about 15 minutes (dodge this, Windows!)
However, some things don’t work so well - or not at all:

• The 4965AGN WLAN card isn’t recognized out of the box.
• UPDATE: I got it working using Intel’s newest mac80211 subsystem using a custom kernel and the iwlwifi driver. Everything can be found on the Intel iwlwifi page (thanks Andi). However, although it is said to support the 802.11n-draft, I was unable to connect to our newest Airport in the office running in “n-only” mode.
• The brightness function key doesn’t do anything at all.
• Probably more related to NVIDIAs proprietary display driver, but X.org randomly crashes when I change to TwinView setup using the NVIDIA Display Settings tool. This seems to be totally random - sometimes it works, sometimes it crashes - but after several times of trying, it lets me change to TwinView eventually.
• Additionally, I cannot log out and/or reboot (!) without X.org freezing. Changing to a text console and rebooting there helps, but is highly inconvenient.
• UPDATE: I have a feeling that it is more related to compiz. Or well, maybe compiz using a wrecked API. Whatever…
• UPDATE: HDA Sound isn’t working. The sound card is recognized but it doesn’t make a noise at all. I tried a related howto for a Thinkpad T61, but it still doesn’t work.

I will probably update this once solutions or workarounds were found.