I’ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I’m typing more softly.
Memory
The first thing I did after receiving it was to arrange a RAM upgrade. It shipped with two 1GB DDR2 666MHz PC2-5300 SODIMM modules and as I want to run KVM I obviously need a lot more than that. The Intel Chipset page on Wikipedia is one of the resources that documents the Intel GM965 chipset as supporting up to 8G of RAM. Getting 4G in two 2G modules seemed like a bad idea as that would limit future expansion options and also result in two spare modules. So I decided to get a 4G module for a total of 5G of RAM. I’ve updated my RAM speed page with the test results of this system [2], I get 2,823MB/s with a matched pair of DIMMs and 2,023MB/s with a single DIMM. But strangely with a pair of unmatched DIMMs Memtest86+ reported 2,823MB/s – I wonder whether the first 2G of address space is interleaved for best performance and the last 3G runs at 2,023MB/s. In any case I think that losing 29% of the maximum RAM speed would be an acceptable trade-off for saving some money and I can always buy another 4G DIMM later. I had to order a DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 module because they are cheaper than the PC2-5300 modules and my Thinkpad works equally well with either speed. I have used the spare 1G SODIMM in my EeePC701 which takes the same RAM – presumably because the EeePC designers found PC2-5300 modules to be cheaper than slower modules (I think that the 701 was at the time it was released the slowest PC compatible system that was selling in quantity). The EeePC gets only 798MB/s out of the same memory. My document about Memtest86+ results has these results and more [2].
I noticed that if I run Memtest86+ booted from a USB flash device then inserting or removing a USB device can cause memory errors, but if I boot memtest86+ from a CD it seems to work correctly. So it seems that Memtest86+ doesn’t disable some aspect of USB hardware, this might be considered a bug – or it might just be a “don’t do that” issue.
Misc
To get the hardware virtualisation working (needed to load the kvm_intel kernel module) I had to enable it in the BIOS and then do a hard reset (power off). Telling the BIOS to save and reboot was not adequate. This would be a BIOS bug, it knew that I had changed the virtualisation setting so it should have either triggered a hard reset or instructed me to do so.
The default configuration of Debian/Lenny results in sound not working, I had to run alsaconf as suggested on the Debian Etch on Thinkpad T61 howto [3] which solved it.
Generally I’m happy with this system, the screen resolution is 1680*1050 which has 20% more pixels than the 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad T41p, it’s a lot faster for CPU operations and should be a lot faster for video when I get the drivers sorted out (currently it’s a lot slower), and I have virtualisation working again. But when you buy a system that’s much like the last one but 6 years newer you expect it to be better.
Generally the amount of effort involved in the process of buying a new system, upgrading the RAM to the desired specs, installing Linux and tweaking all the options is enough to make me want to wait at least another 6 years before buying another. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that I want to get so much functionality from the machine, a machine with more modest goals (such as a Netbook) takes a lot less time to configure.
Problems
There is Bluetooth hardware which is apparently enabled by default. But a quick search didn’t turn up any information on how to do the basic functions, I would like to just transfer files from my mobile phone in the same way that I transfer files between phones.
The video card is a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1). 3D games seem slow but glxgears reports 300fps. It doesn’t have Xvideo support which appears to be the reason why mplayer won’t allow resizing it’s display area unless run with the -zoom option, and it’s also got performance problems such that switching between virtual desktops will interrupt the sound on a movie that mplayer is playing – although when alsaplayer is playing music the sound isn’t interrupted. Also when I play a Youtube video at twice the horizontal and vertical resolution it takes half of one CPU core. It’s a pity that I didn’t get an Intel video controller.
The next thing I have to do is to get the sound controls working. The older Thinkpads that I used had hardware controls, the T41p that was my previous system had buttons for increasing and decreasing the volume and a mute button that interacted directly with the hardware. The down-side of this was that there was no way for the standard software to know what the hardware was going to do, the up-side was that I could press the mute button and know that it would be silent regardless of what the software wants. Now I have the same buttons on my T61 but they don’t do anything directly, they just provide key-press events. According to showkeys the mute key gives “0x71 0xf1“, the volume down button gives “0x72 0xf2“, and the volume up button gives “0x73 0xf3“. Daniel Pittman has made some suggestions to help me get the keyboard events mapped to actions that can change the sound via software [5] – which I haven’t yet had time to investigate. I wonder if it will ever be possible to change the volume of the system beep.
The system has an SD card slot, but that doesn’t seem to work. I’m not really worried at the moment but in the future I will probably try and get it going. It has a 100G disk which isn’t that big, adding a 32G SD card at some future time might be the easiest way to upgrade the storage – copying 100G of data is going to be painful and usually a small increment in storage capacity can keep a system viable for a while.
Any advice on getting sound, the SD card, and Bluetooth working would be appreciated. I’ll probably upgrade to Debian/Testing in the near future so suggestions that require testing features won’t be ruled out.
- [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/15/new-thinkpad-lenovo-web-site-sucks/
- [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/
- [3] http://www.klabs.be/~fpiat/linux/debian/Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61.html
- [4] http://bgoglin.livejournal.com/19624.html
- [5] http://lists.luv.asn.au/wws/arc/luv-main/2010-03/msg00123.html
I have only one word to say: ThinkWiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T61).
It contains answers to most (all?) questions you asked.
SD just worked on my X200. I put in an SD card and it shows up as /dev/sdX for some X >= ‘b’.
glxgears isn’t a benchmark, it’s a very naive fillrate test. Less than about 1000 fps, and you’re very likely to be doing all the rendering on the CPU and not the GPU (and glxinfo | grep ^direct will probably say No). 300fps certainly isn’t running on the GPU.
The current nv_drv.so driver should be considered useful only for basic 2D blitting. You’ll need something better – be it Nouveau (which has never worked for me) or the proprietary nvidia-glx, if you want any kind of GPU offload, whether it’s for 3D or XVideo.
Kristjan: Thanks for the link. They get it wrong by claiming that the T61 can only support 4G of RAM so I’ll take their stuff with a grain of salt. The section on getting Debian working with Bluetooth says “My Logitech Bluetooth mouse works” which isn’t very helpful.
[1207898.101560] mmc0: unrecognised SCR structure version 12
[1207898.102573] mmc0: error -22 whilst initialising SD card
Anon: The above is the error message I get when I insert the only SD card that is available to me. The card in question is the one that I use for /home on my EeePC 701, it’s worked on all Debian/Unstable kernels since an EeePC 701 was still a relatively current model. So I conclude that the card is not failing because of a Linux kernel issue or a card issue. So it must be the Thinkpad.
Jo: Thanks for the information. Fortunately I can watch TED talks in high resolution without XVideo, and as that’s the only visually demanding application I really care about for this machine I’m relatively satisfied. I do have access to a nice system with an Intel 82945G/GZ that runs SuperTuxCarts and TuxRacer quite nicely.
I’ve had a T61 (6466-66G) for a couple of years. It’s a fine machine, although not as pretty as older Thinkpads. Mine has Intel video (yay fully-functional 3D accel out of the box with open drivers!), with a 1280×800 screen. AFAIU all the higher-resolution models come with NVidia :(
My SD card reader works only if I’m careful not to push the card in too deep. Apparently the slot is a bit too, well, deep, and if I push a card all the way in, the contacts no longer touch, or something.
I’ve never had problems with sound — maybe Ubuntu has some tweaks that haven’t been upstreamed yet, or maybe mine has slightly different hardware? The volume keys are mapped to the appropriate X11 keysyms out of the box, so GNOME reacts, applies the change and shows a pretty volume bar. I miss hardware volume keys, though — it’s silly being unable to mute the speaker just because some app opened a popup menu and therefore has an active server grab.
Bluetooth should Just Work, mostly. I don’t know exactly what software I use — GNOME shows a Bluetooth applet in my systray on login, right-clicking it I get options to browse or send files. There are command-line tools too, e.g. obexftp.
I have a T400 which is a later version of the T series. I also have a much older Z series thinkpad. On both of them, bluetooth just works(tm) with Debian. I like the blueman suite myself. /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth lets you turn it on and off.
I got my T400 with the smart card reader instead of the SD slot. The Z60m has one, it shows up as /dev/pcmmcblk0 or something like that, but also Just Works(TM).
Oh, I forgot, regarding sound, my T400 is the same. I have this in my .fluxbox/keys:
None XF86AudioLowerVolume :ExecCommand /usr/bin/amixer sset ‘Master’,0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer set ‘Master’,0 1-
None XF86AudioRaiseVolume :ExecCommand /usr/bin/amixer sset ‘Master’,0 unmute && /usr/bin/amixer set ‘Master’,0 1+
None XF86AudioMute :ExecCommand /usr/bin/amixer sset ‘Master’,0 mute
I also own the laptop in question, however I run it using Squeeze. I have the nvidia quaddro NVS 140M, but the smaller version of the screen. I don’t have the problems in video that you are having with the proprietary drivers. Also I would like to point out Nouveau has even worse performance on average, and that it does not actually support our chipset. If you have nvidia-settings installed, you can turn your settings to performance, which greatly increased my framerates. Also be aware that the chipset throttles from level 0 (100mhz)to level 2 (600mhz). You can control the throttling modes in your xconf, or live via the nvidia-settings utility.
Also be sure to set your charge rates. I managed to kill my battery fairly quick because they weren’t set.
If you consider chroot an alternative to Xen/KVM, lguest might be worth a try.
I only use KVM to launch some windows app. Running debian unstable with selfcompiled latest vanilla kernel, the only problem I have with KVM is jumping mouse cursor and SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 not helping. And VNC sometimes crashes KVM(wtf..)