Debian on a ThinkPad Edge 15

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:27:32 +0000

All my notebooks till today have been ThinkPads from the T series, sadly Lenovo decided (or, maybe, were persuaded) to go with nVidia GPUs for their current designs (T5xx). That's sad, because nVidia doesn't cooperate with the FLOSS world. I still wanted a ThinkPad with up-to-date parts. That left me with the Edge series, which is designed to be the bridge between consumer and business models. After some searching I settled on the NVLJ6GE model (the last two letters just indicate, that this is the "German" variant). The key specs are Intel Core i5-480M, 4096 MB RAM, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5145, Intel WLAN module and a non-glare display.

Now to the part about running and installing Debian testing on this. Judging from the hardware I was pretty sure, that getting all hardware (i.e. all hardware I'd be using; e.g. I'm not using WiMax or the integrated web cam so far, which means I've dectivated them in the BIOS) up and running. and I'm happy to report, that this is true.

The installation was really straight forward (netinstall CD in expert mode (64 bit), running through all steps and booting, that's it). I did the install over a wired network, mainly because this is faster for me, but with an USB stick and the firmware for the Intel Centrino module a installation over the wireless interface should work too.

I'm now running a slightly customized setup (e.g. my own 2.6.38.2 kernel and Mesa 7.10.2, the X from experimental), but not because some serious problems with Wheezy.

So far I can recommend this ThinkPad for usage with Debian (or Linux in general), though, if you don't want a "big" GPU, you might be happier with a T or L series model. They should run somewhat longer with the default battery (Lenovo 25+ with six cells). As for the service for this line I can't say anything yet, but as it's still a ThinkPad, I hope it'll be as for the other ThinkPad series.