I'm now running a Thinkpad T43 under Fedora Core 4.
The entire installation process was painless; the machine seems well-supported by FC4. Some non-obvious notes, though:
- Bluetooth is recognized as a built-in USB device. To make this work after suspend/resume, remove the modules uhci_hcd, ehci_hcd, and hci_usb before putting the machine to sleep, and re-add them after wakeup.
- The built-in Intel i915 graphics adapter is supported either by the Vesa driver, or by the i810 driver. The latter will only work if you install some recent DRI drivers.
- To make Xorg work after suspend/resume, make sure you add acpi_sleep=s3_bios to your kernel command line.
I haven't tried the built-in modem
That said, the machine makes generally a very good impression. It's slimmer and lighter than my old Thinkpad R40, while at the same time making a much more robust impression.
The only negative observations so far: The T43 heats up much quicker than the R40, hence the fan ends up running most of the time; I wonder if this is related to the driver that I'm using for the graphics adapter. Also, probably due to the reduced height of the laptop, the keyboard has a different and, I think, more flimsy touch than the one on the R40 -- that machine has probably the best keyboards (laptop or desktop) I have ever used.
