So after two long months of waiting, my laptop finally came in on Friday last week. However, since it was shipped via UPS and no one was home, I did not end up getting it till Monday.

So far, it has been pretty awesome. The X61 is an ultraportable, being somewhere around 3 lb. On the best settings (ie. wireless off, screen at lowest brightness, etc.) the laptop can last for somewhere in the range of 8-10 hours. Otherwise, I see the laptop work on battery for around 6-7 hours. This is pretty awesome. However, that’s only for Windows.

I also managed to install xubuntu, shortly after tweaking around the settings, repartitioning things, and even doing a system restore because my attempts to do a clean install failed and no OEM CDs exist anymore. It works well for the most part, save several issues:

• I can not get the brightness keys working.
• General laptop power management tools do not exist on the machine at the time of writing. I just do not know what to use or what is out there, but it will be something to look for over the weekend.
• Most of the Fn keys are not working.
• compiz-fusion runs quite slowly – maybe it is the X3100..
• I get these weird lines on the screen from time to time and have general unexpected display behaviour, such as parts of the screen not dimmed out when the password prompt appears when one runs a program which requires root access, like Synaptic.

Sure, there are some issues, but quite minor and will not make things difficult to work with in Linux, which is good since that will be my primary work environment in terms of Web development.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 11:27 am and is filed under Life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.