Thinkpad T60p
I got a new (used) Thinkpad T60p last weekend, completely pimped out! 2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, ATI FireGL Mobility V5200 256 MB, bluetooth, cellular modem, and a fingerprint reader. I immediately wiped the Windows installation and the recovery partition and installed Gentoo.
What Works
* Hibernate/sleep functions
* Fingerprint reader
* Bluetooth
* Audio
* 802.11 and ethernet
What Doesn't
* Compiz (it does and it doesn't). Originally I used the radeon driver when installing xorg but I've since switched to the radeonhd driver. I had to add Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" to my xorg.conf to get mplayer to work while using Compiz. I also had an issue with painfully slow minimizing/maximizing in Compiz that was fixed by applying the patch in this post. The patch made Opera display garbage for a few milliseconds while starting but I was ok with that. Scrolling in Opera was really slow and the screen wouldn't update if you held down the scroll button, it would just smear. I decided I'd had enough with Compiz and switched back to xfwm4. Compiz does look pretty and work but it's not ready for the prime-time yet IMHO.
* The power saving modes on the CPU. Whenever the processor entered C3 (sleep mode) there would be a high pitched noise that would come from the fan port. The only solution I have found that works so far is to disable the sleep mode by passing processor.max_cstate=2 on the kernel command line (if you have the processor ACPI plugin built as a module you would pass that to the module). No idea on how much this will worsen batter life yet, but the noise was so irritating the laptop was unusable when on battery. See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_high_pitch_noises#Limit_ACPI_CPU_power_states. A post on a forum that I can't find now said it was due to inductor whine, and could be fixed by hot gluing the inductors back down to the board. I don't have a problem doing that myself but I'm wary of voiding the warranty so I called Lenovo yesterday and they said they'll send a technician out to look at it. I'll update this page when he does. I imagine he'll just replace the motherboard.
* Half Life 2. I bought the Orange Box after seeing all the platinum reports in the Wine AppDB, but apparently those were with nVidia cards. I've been trying to get it to work for the past week with no success. HL2 will start but it hangs on the loading screen. Apparently it's not a problem with Wine but rather a problem with the sorry state of the ATI drivers, or maybe both. A bug exists in the Wine Bugzilla but it doesn't look like anyone really cares enough to fix it. I've seen some vague reports that HL2 does work with the fglrx driver but I'm loathe to install it as apparently it will break hibernation/sleep/and a host of other things. It also won't compile with recent kernels (> 2.6.26). A case of damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess. I'm going to see if it works in VirtualBox as they recently released Direct3D support in their emulated graphics card. It's more a question of whether the VM is fast enough to run HL2, I'm pretty confident it will work.
Don't Know
* I have the drivers and software installed to use the embedded security chip but I haven't used them yet. Trying to resolve the above, first.* I haven't tried to use the cellular modem yet. Sierra Wireless provides a driver on their website.
* I haven't tried to use the softmodem either. Apparently you have to purchase the driver for it, which means I most likely won't be using it ever.