I recently purchased a Lenovo X61s to run Linux based on my happy experience with the Lenovo X60s.
General impressions: Great laptop. Light, bright screen. Physically small. Very good Linux support.
Pros:
- light weight
- continuing on the X60s, pretty much everything works out-of-the box with current Linux (Fedora 8)
Cons:
- relatively minor power-management glitches (work-arounds exist)
- have to pay for Windows
Machine stats for the X61s: see the very good Thinkwiki X61s page.
My only caveat: by default, after resume, the screen backlight is off. The computer is on and working fine, but minimal (barely visible) video.
The work-around is to toggle to a different virtual terminal and back (after resume, do a control-alt-F1, then control-alt-F7). Strangely, the usual pm-suspend work-arounds don’t work, including pm-suspend --quirk-reset-brightness, pm-suspend --quirk-s3-bios, and pm-suspend --quirk-s3-mode. And unfortunatley, the New World Order of Fedora 7 and later seem to ignore /etc/sysconfig/apmd’s CHANGEVT. Go figure.
FreeBSD
Mark Duller reports (Thanks) that FreeBSD works fine on the X61s, except that standby reset the system. He suggests this patch from Takanori Watanabe.