Everything thing works great. You always need to remeber to compile your own support in if you making your own kernel.

1st laptop. 15% into the install, just stopped. BIOS flaw introduced by the install. Laptop then failed POST. Motherboard replacement required to fix so it is now a doorstop.

Install appeared to go flawlessly. No sound. STFW to fix. Multiple and various attempts over a couple of weeks all failed.

System either refuses to boot or boots sporadically. ACPI LNKC conflict halts boot. STFW to fix. Multiple and various attempts over a couple of weeks all failed.

Rescue CD attempts, reinstall attempts, and replace with a different distro all failed. Same ACPI error in all of them.

Carting it off to the local LUG failed.

Installed Windows XP - works like a champ. Total time for WinXP to resolve all issues, a little under 90 minutes.

Pros:
- Everything works -- almost everything "just works".
- Extremely well built.
- The sound quality on headphones sounds *exceptionally* clear and good. Better than the Audigy card in my desktop, disturbingly enough.

Cons:
- PC100 SODIMM RAM is getting very expensive these days, so if you happen to have one low on RAM it may cost you to upgrade that.
- lm_sensors **may possibly destroy this laptop** You thus only have a thermal zone reading via ACPI, which I think is disturbingly off -- it reads nearly 80C under load.

A few useful utilities for this model:
* app-laptop/thinkpad
Available versions: 3.2 4.1 4.3 4.3-r1 4.8 5.7 5.8
Installed: 5.8
Homepage: http://tpctl.sourceforge.net
Description: Thinkpad system control kernel modules

* app-laptop/ibm-acpi
Available versions: 0.11-r1
Installed: 0.11-r1
Homepage: http://ibm-acpi.sourceforge.net
Description: IBM ThinkPad ACPI extras

Used laptop, runs Mandriva 2006 and Ubuntu perfectly. Suspend mode works. Battery indicator has a mind of its own, sometimes flashes until a reboot. Very pleased.

Looks and runs great, few issues though:

-- PCMCIA Support not "out-of-the-box", you'll have to configure your cards yourself. For some reason Hot Swapping from Ultrabay 2000 or PC Cards just doesn't work.

-- For some reason, every 30 seconds the system goes into a small freeze (less than 5 seconds) where keyboard input and mouse input is halted. Then, after the freeze, the input is parsed as if all of it is done at once. Still trying to diagnose what that's coming from...

-- Using the TEAC CD-RW Ultrabay drive, burning is a snap.

-- Monitor on my system worked fine (I heard somewhere on a SuSE Linux install, that the distro didn't setup the display properly after installation and came up with an error message during every boot sequence.)

-- Modem worked fine as well.

Under PCLinuxOS, everything is detected properly except for the video card. You have to set up DRI yourself, and double the amount of video RAM in the xorg.conf. I didn't try to install thinkpad, and ibm-acpi was built into the kernel.
Ultrabayd was installed, but I forget to try and use it... i end up just taking the drive out, and it freezes the whole machine.

Under Gentoo, almost everything worked perfectly, including Ultrabay (although it wasn't proper, I could just take the drive out and replace it with something else at will without the PC freezing on me)

Under both distros, the FN+F# combos did not work, aside from the one that toggles monitor and LCD support.

Everything working except that:

I din't tested the modem.

For ibm_acpi (you want this) you need a 2.6.14<? (I don't remember) kernel.

Hotswap in ultrabay does NOT work :-( But You can Install 2nd hard disk or dvd or battery.

System is up for 130 days without problem!