Overall impression

I've ordered my X60 via the Internet, since no local shop was willing to order it, without me buying it – no way to first look at it / check it.
The X60 with the T2600 Core Duo processor is really fast (twice 4322.76 per Core according to /proc/cpuinfo). Also the harddisk transfers seam to be much faster than with my old Sony Vaio NV105 (hdparam -Tt reports 2315.12 MB/sec for cached reads and 34.46 MB/sec for buffered reads).
Booting takes less than two minutes including KDE startup (timed 1:40 manually). So, performance is excellent.
The notebook itself looks really nice, I do like the keyboard, it's light (at least compared to my Sony), nice peace of hardware.

Installation

Installing OpenSuSE was without problems (I used the DVD made available recently). The installer proposed to shrink the one large Windows partition to 31GB which was ok for me. Also partitions for Swap, Root and Home were proposed. I added some packages I'd like and the installation was carried out without any problems.

Result: Linux and dual boot working, but screen resolution only 800x600

Making the ATI X1400 work

Downloaded the current ATI driver 8.24.8 and followed the installation instructions. Xorg.conf got modified by the installer and I had a 1600x1050 resolution. But

• switching to a console (CTRL+ALT+F1...F6) gives only garbage on the display. When trying to switch back the Xserver restarts.

Update 25.05.2006
Solved with new driver version 8.28.18

• Also in /var/log/messages there are some complains about „no more MTRR's“. This seams to be linked to the memory management and the main memory used by the graphics card. Need to investigate in more detail. No direct negative effect found yet.

Update 27.05.2006
Does not occur any more with driver version 8.24.18, ok for me

• 3D acceleration is not detected by many programs

Update 25.05.2006
Not sure, if the 8.24.18 driver update solves this as well. However glxgears has improved to 3190 fps
Update 08.07.2006
The new version of the ATI driver (8.26.18) works well – glxgrears is at 3112 fps...but only after cleaning up old modules that were left in the module dir by the old driver version...

Result: Working

Making WLAN work

This was some kind of nightmare. The shipped driver (ipw3945.ko) is not working with the X60. Had to download a recent version from sourceforge. However this requires also the IEEE80211 package to be installed. Here I had to learn it the hard way: IEEE80211 version 1.1.13 is not working with ipw3945-1.0.3. The makefiles of version 1.1.11 and 1.1.12 are somewhat corrupt. At least on my X60 they started to work and than removed the contents of the driver directory (mv instead of cp?). Since I did not want to fiddle around with the Makefile, I used version 1.1.12 with the 1.1.13 Makefile – works. Details can be configured with YaST.

Result: Some manual work required – but it works !

Sound

Well, what a sad story. The alsa version shipped with OpenSuSE 10.1 is not working with the sound chip. After some research I found that there is an issue with the snd-hda-intel module that was resolved in alsa 1.0.11rc3. But I could not make more recent versions of Also work so far.
When compiled and installed and modprobe of the snd-hda-intel.ko module does not finish (no error reported on the command line) – it just takes forever. However in /var/log/messages an error is reported “ioremap error”.

For now I have disabled the Intel HDA (high definition audio) module by renaming it. I do hope that there will be an Alsa update for OpenSuSE 10.1 soon, that will solve the issue. The solution seams to be out there, I just can't make it work :-(

Tried to get version 1.0.11 working (27.05.2006)

Downloaded the current Alsa version sources (1.0.11), complied them and installed them as well. So far ok. However the modprobe snd-hda-intel fails.
Makes the computer almost not usable anymore. Many complains about kernel symbols not matching and still an ioremap error. Will have to wait for the next Also update....or come up with some better idea to make this work.

Update 08.07.2006
It's working !
I received an email from Nico Laum end of June, containing a tip how to make the sound work. However, I did not have the time try to get it working until today. I had to do lots of tests until I found the core issue that prevented to tip proposed by Nico to work on my machine.... From the earlier experiments with the new Alsa version some modules remained in the /lib/modules directory and they did not work with the SuSE kernel modules. Result: Trying to set-up the sound card failed with a module load error in YaST. Once I removed the offending modules and did as proposed by Nico add
options snd-hda-intel index=0 single_cmd=1 model=laptop-eapd
in
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
all is working. Could set-up the sound card in YaST, unmute it in the alsamixer and nice sound. Nico reported later also that it looks like the
index=0 single_cmd=1
part isn't actually required. But I haven't tried that (yet). Thanks Nico !

Update 19.07.2006
Manage to enable the Fn Vol+ / Vol- keys and the multimedia keys for the volume. Needed to create a ~/.Xmodmap file with this content:
! Audio Keys
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
and after logoff / logon volume control works even with a nice spash window in KDE (Note: Display brightness control via Fn-Keys is working out of the box).

Result: Working

Tweaking

Speedstep

In /var/log/messages rcpowersaved informs me that I should add 'speedstep_centrino' into CPUFREQD_MODULE in /etc/powersave/cpufreq. Did so, and the message went away....

Result: cat /proc/cpuinfo reports variable cpu Mhz depending on system load - working

Extra keys (Music, Camera, Video, Volume up and down)

xev reports the scancodes for the keys, but only for volume up and down. The others do no create one.... With xmodmap and assignement of key names at least volume up and down could be made working, but since audio isn't working at all, there is no point in doing so now.

Suspend to Ram / Suspend to Disk (26.05.2006)

It's nearly magic.... Suspend to disk works out of the box with the new ATI dirver.

For Suspend to ram to work, it was required to force SuSE to just do it (set SUSPEND2RAM_FORCE to “yes” in /etc/sysconfig/powersave/sleep).

Result: Great stuff !