Josh Saddler

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. In spite of the rain that's deluging the county. Why? Because my Thinkpad R61i arrived today.

I lucked out in three critical ways:

1) Shipping condition. Not a scratch; it's like it was never used.
2) Trackpad. I booted the x86 2007.0 LiveCD, and it seems to think that it's a real Synaptics device. I mean, scrolling on the pad was enabled and everything. Though it did decide that the top middle button, when pressed, should be an M key.
3) Working fingerprint reader. While lsusb isn't present on the LiveCD, some poking around /proc/bus/usb/devices showed a vendor ID of 0483:2016, which is supported by fprint, and presumably by thinkfinger as well.

I only had time to boot it up and quickly check the hardware specs before heading off to work. Will post more on it later, and I think I'll write up some installation notes and stick 'em in my devspace too.

Happiness is an awesome laptop. This thing is so quiet. Lightweight, too. And it seems to have hardware that actually works in Linux. Sure, the keyboard layout isn't satisfactory, but I can probably work around that with keybinding. It's otherwise a dream machine. Well, mine anyway.

I want to take it to SCALE in a couple of weeks, but now I'm worried about it being stolen. Figures. I'll at least bring along my ancient crappy Toshiba laptop as a booth demo machine. That worked last year.