Thinkpad T400 and Ubuntu 9.04

So my new work laptop arrived the other day, it’s a Thinkpad T400 with a 2.6Ghz processor, 4gigs of ram and a 160gig 7200rpm drive. I decided to go with Ubuntu for the OS this time since I have not tried it before and some other people I know appear to have had good success with it on their Thinkpad laptops. They also had just recently release the new 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope version so what better time to give it a try.

So far I have been very happy, the only hick-up I ran into was when I loaded the proprietary hardware driver for the ATI videocard. After installing the ATI driver and rebooting the system it would start to load X and then lock with corrupted graphics on the LCD. After some digging I found a post about other Thinkpads with a switchable graphics card that can operate between a low-power mode and a discrete mode. After turning of the OS detection and forcing the BIOS to only use the discrete mode all of the graphics lock up issues went away.

For everything else, the wireless, ethernet, suspend, bluetooth, sound, webcam, dvd burner all worked out of the box with no configuration required.

Posted by Will on May 12, 2009