Hello All,

I am planning to buy Thinkpad SL 510. I do not use Windows at all and will be installing Linux over it preferably Ubuntu 10.04. I want to know how is the performance of Linux on SL 510? I have heard that it does not have ACPI support for linux. So will it give problems related to power and all?? Overall how do u rate this machine?

I got my SL510 yesterday (2847-7mg) and i'm very pleased. My version was supposed to come with a DOS preinstalled, but it turned out the harddisk was empty. Who needs DOS anyways?

I have the 2GB version for 430 euros and bought 2GB more for 60 euros. 4GB should be plenty.

It doesn't feel bad, it's cheap, but still a thinkpad. I havent installed anything yet, but i plan to use NetBSD and Ubuntu on it. I'll try to report later how it went.

Didn't go very well. I installed Kubuntu 10.04 from the alternate CD. Installation went fine and all the hardware worked, wireless, ethernet, vga and such. However, there seems to be a problem with the thinkpad-acpi driver, it says unsupported modell. The result was that the fan was constantly running .

My guess is that the SL510 needs a different acpi driver since the firmware isn't the usual thinkpad stuff, it might even be worth a shot to try Kubuntu 10.10 beta, wich has a newer kernel and might support the acpi-hardware.

That's the cost of recent hardware, i guess.

It's not really the cost of recent hardware as much as it is the cost of the SL series.

The SL series don't use the real ThinkPad BIOS. Instead, they use the IdeaPad BIOS. This means that thinkpad-acpi doesn't support them (since, as far as the software is concerned, it's not actually a ThinkPad.) That said, thinkpad-acpi does have experimental support for the SL series, but IIRC it's only available in newer versions. (I have never used said support, as I don't have an SL series machine to play with.)

Just bought an SL510 and have set it up as a dual-boot machine with Ubuntu 10.10 on a separate partition. Everything seems to work fine. The fan only turns on when I am doing something intensive on the machine, and all hot-keys *seem* to be working. Have not tested it yest with external VGA and HDMI. I am very pleased with the capability an perfomance of the machine, especially for the $440 cost. I would purchase this machine with no reservations for use as a Linux equipped laptop.

Well by default the fan is controlled by the BIOS/EC, so no surprise there.

The hotkeys, on the other hand, are indeed handled by the kernel -- so I'm guessing 10.10 uses a recent enough kernel that its version of thinkpad_acpi has the SL support baked in.

I did try to force loading thinkpad_acpi.ko but It wasnt very useful
Fell free to try that as I did :

http://rzr.online.fr/q/sensor#module

Just in case anyone is still interested. I have it running with Debian for quite some time now. First with Debian6, now with Debian7 (testing, Kernel is 3.2). Everything works as expected. WLAN, Bluetooth, Sound, camera, VGA and so on. I have not tested HDMI but expect it to work, just like the rest.

I don't use all the hotkeys. What works are the volume- and brightness-settings. Mute does not, but you can just turn the volume down.

The only thing i still have to do is this in /etc/rc.local:

echo N > /sys/module/drm_kms_helper/parameters/poll

I'm not sure what it does, but without it the mouse hangs every few seconds for a short time. It seems there is some kind of interrupt storm without that setting. Anyways, this seems to solve it, so i don't really care.