Since a couple of months, I wanted to change my heavy laptop (a HP6710, around 3KG) for a lighter one because I’m walking with this thing on my back for around 1h every day and my back hurts 
At some point, I was very interested in the new 12″ netbooks like the Dell Mini 12 but due to the lack of power and the nonexistent graphic drivers for Linux, I had to look for something else…Lenovo always made very neat sub-notebooks, but they are expensive as hell.
Fortunately for me, we can buy them with a heavy discount at school, and that’s exactly what I did! I got a Lenovo ThinkPad x301 for around 1500€.
So, I’m now the proud owner of a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad x301 sub-notebook:
- Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 (2x 1.4GHz, 6MB cache)
- 128GB SSD drive
- 4GB DDR3 RAM
- 13.3″ 1440×900 LED backlit screen
The laptop itself is very light, 1.5Kg with the 6-cell battery for a total traveling weight of 1.8Kg when you include the small charger and all the cables.
The connectors present on this small machine are more than adequate for a normal use:
- VGA
- DisplayPort
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 3x USB 2
- Audio in/out
- DVD writer
- WiFi on/off switch
The keyboard is full-sized and as you can see on the above picture, there are only 3 buttons to control the volume and a fingerprint reader, no other fancy and useless stuff. You also have the standard IBM trackpad + touchpad which both work on Fedora. Let’s talk about Fedora
Fedora 10 can be installed without any problem on this machine, all the hardware except the fingerprint reader (which I don’t use anyways) works out of the box. The brightness control works as do the up/down volume control buttons. The only non-working thing is the mute button; I should probably report it somewhere, but I don’t know where…does anyone have an idea?
EDIT: a solution was given in the comments, append acpi_osi=”Linux” to your kernel and it works partially.
The other great feature on this laptop is the 128GB SSD. It’s a Samsung unit rated at 90MB/s reading, 70MB/s writing. You can really feel the difference compared to a normal 5400rpm HDD, the OS is much more responsive in general.
I also made a little video to show you the boot speed. From the powerup to GRUB, around 20 seconds are passing by. From GRUB to the login screen, only 17 seconds are needed. I think that we are hitting the BIOS’ slowness here, which is sad. GIVE ME EFI!
EDIT: with an optimized BIOS, the boot time went down to 24 seconds.
The 1440×900 screen resolution on a 13.3″ screen is really nice once you have set your Gnome desktop settings to 96 DPI and your font size to 10. Here is a screenshot of my desktop with these settings. You can also have access to this machine’s SMOLT profie and it’s hardinfo_report.
Do you see anything in “dmesg” when you press the mute button?
Does it generate X11 events (use “xev” to find out).
Thanks.
Hello,
It doesn’t generate any output to dmesg, nor to xev. Only the volume up/down generate events to xev.
To make the “mute” button work, append
acpi_osi=”Linux”
to the kernel command line. It works on my Lenovo W500.
I would be glad to give you the source for this, but I really can not remember where I found it.
On Thinkpads the time from power-up to GRUB is just too long!
Hey, this works perfectly fine! They seem to talk about in on http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2008-01/msg04543.html
Gah, so jealous… wish I could have afforded an SSD and 4GB of ram a few months ago when I bought my MacBook.
Davide: I was too quick to respond, in fact it half works
With “xev” I can see an event coming from the mute button, the PulseAudio icon gets changed to mute but the sound continues to play, it’s only muting the “Master” channel, but not the “PCM” channel. I guess this is a problem with PulseAudio, and not the button itself anymore 
With some BIOS tweakings (disabling the fingerprint reader, bluetooth, only letting the HDD in the boot sequence) I managed to reduce the TOTAL boot time from 37 to 24 seconds. That’s damn sweet.
Steven: I do not know about this sound problem… I am still mainly using Fedora 9, and things seem to work there. It looks like the problem is somewhere in the area of Alsa/Pulseaudio.
Thanks for the hints on BIOS speedup! I can’t wait to try on my W500 and see if they work there too!
Steven: If the Master channel is mute and you still hear sounds that’s most likely an ALSA bug, please report it to Bugzilla. As a workaround, you can configure the volume control applet to control PCM — you can choose in its preferences dialog.
My Lenovo x301 will arrive next week. I” install Ubuntu 8.10. Does your laptop wwan 3g? does it works in Fedora?
Nop, I didn’t take the 3G option.
3g wont config itself for you … but
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Ericsson_F3507g_Mobile_Broadband_Module
i have acer 4730z, but until this time i can’t using my cdma modem (Venus VT-12), i used mandriva 2009. maybe you can suggest some distro for me? thanks
im running a dual boot with my thinkpad w500 – windows xp and fedora 10. fedora 10 runs flawlessly, but when i reboot, windows xp does not locate the video driver. then i reboot again, the thinkpad lcd is blank. i have to powerdown and remove the battery before it works correctly!