Highlights
With the ThinkPad 570, you can have the best of both worlds—a road warrior’s dream—a super thin and light ultraportable as well as a highly configurable desktop alternative. It's now become my pride and joy, the reason for purchasing what some have described as a overpriced "babe of computing" is for IBM's brand name it's 3 year international warranty and most specifically for my need of a computer for my MEng studies @ University College London.
The UltraBase flexibility gives me either a portable set without the CD-ROM drives and the Floppy. So when I do go into 'Road Warrior' Mode, the set is all I need. I do stick a 48MB SanDisk flash card in so I can share files with other friends who use Laptops. The great thing is that this flash card is from my 200LX and it is detected by all 3 of my operating systems on board.
Specifiations
A basic description of all things related:
Technical Specifications (Model 2644-1AA):
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Installation
My machine basically does a triple-boot (Linux, Win98
& BeOS) via LILO. My HDD is partitioned as follows:
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When I first got the machine, I had only 2 partitions of 2GB and 1.91GB. The pre-installed Windows 98 was resident on the partially larger partition. Using the CFdisk on the Debian Install CD, I repartitioned the HDD as above. I'll spare you my trials of installing Debian 2.1. Basically, I tried to install Debian 2.1, a minimal system, and tried to do the rest by indidual package installs but encountered far to many problems. It was far too discouraging and this pissed me off. If you do inist on using Debian an important point to note is to use the Debian resc1440tecra-safe.bin boot disk (and corresponding driver disk).
On the contrary, RedHat 6.0's installation was a breeze. The whole installation was so simple and as such, a real RTFM installation as such, I will skip that all.
Another point to note for those who want to triple-boot with BeOS. Do remember to place your BeOS on a primary partition else LILO won't see it.
X Configuration
It's a brilliant display. Using XFree86 (Version 3.3.3.1), which includes support for the NeoMagic chips. The Red Hat installation configured my XWindows well. There was no selection for 2.5MB of VRAM as such, I chose 2MB as a conservative choice.
Sound
I'm still struggling with this if anyone can offer a helping hand, please advise.
I've put in this extract which I got off the Linux for Laptops pages:
| Late News! Thanks to Greg (email address not published) I tried
again on the sound front; here is his information:
Just wanted to let you know that I got sound working on my thinkpad
570
I used alsa-driver-0.3.1 and alsa-conf-0.3.0-pre5. Installed the driver as per the install. Then ran the conf, it detected the driver, and altered /etc/conf.modules. The only think I had to fix was change the line in /etc/conf.modules that said: alias snd-card-0 to: alias snd-card-0 snd-card-cs461x Then ran alsasound in utils/ in alsa-driver-0.3.1 and it all worked. Those drivers are available from http://www.alsa-project.org. You will
need to read the information there to compile and install the
I also wanted to note one or two things that threw me off/might be issues for you: As stated with the alsa driver docs, the mixer
channels are muted by default, so you'll need to use a mixer (such as xamixer2)
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MODEM
The modem is a WinModem by Lucent Technologies (I hope they employ me someday), don't know anyone who's got it working under Linux due to the refusal of Lucent and other WinModem manufacturers to release the specifications for it.
At the moment, I download most of my Linux stuff into a directory on my Windows partition and this is automatically mounted as part of my FStab file then I access them from Linux. So that's that.
IRPort
As specified by the catalogue, the port works up to 4MBPS under Windows, this works well though I haven't tried doing anything with the IR port under Linux yet.
Power Management
Power management is enabled under Linux and it detects the battery power
or if it's on-line simply by typing apm at the prompt.
The battery life is roughly about 3.3hrs, though multiple re-boots
will lessen that time.
Some other opinions
Some other laptops I'd reccomend are as follows:
ThinkPad 390 -
Not as expensive as the 570 so you compensate size and portability
but none the less a great portable at a more affordable price.
Toshiba Tecra 8000 -
The model Toshiba had released to directly challenge the ThinkPad570.
Sadly, it didn't appeal to me.
Sony VAIOZ505 -
My other choice. This was the other set I might have bought.
Though the price tag with all the accessories thrown in would have added
up to be more expensive than my ThinkPad 570. Though to be fair, the specifications
for this set give a larger HDD, a proper modem, a built-in Ethernet card
and a 366MHz processor. My dislikes though about this set are: the
12.1" screen, a touch pad glide point type mouse (the trackball on my TP
570 is by far the best 'nuff said) and the lack of a proper dealer in Singapore
(You'll have to order it from Sony VAIO Direct)