Acutally my particular Thinkpad 770X differs from the above description. There are several different models. Mine has:

64MB ram
8.1GB Hard drive (which I replaced with 20GB disk when it died)
Trident Cyber 9397DVD rather than standard 9397

Also, the sound chip stated above isn't necessarily correct. The Thinkpad 770X sound chip should usually be treated as a CS4236.

Here's all the details:

+ The Ultrabay CD and Floppy disk drive can be hot swapped, although you need to boot up with the CD drive in the bay for it to be detected. Even during installation of Slackware, I could create a booktdisk by swapping the drives just before and after the bootdisk creation! But in normal use you should unmount before swapping drives. Always wait for the LED to stop flashing before removing the CD drive. Audio CDs can be played (see below for more on sound).

+ The USB port works great

+ PCMCIA slots (Cardbus) work although I haven't tested with two cards.

+ PS/2 mouse port and built in TrackPoint all work. The TrackPoint is supported as PS/2.

+ The Thinkpad keyboard is supported. In xorgconfig, select as though another Thinkpad e.g. 600E.

+ The Trident Cyber 9397 (generic) graphics adapter is also listed in xorgconfig. Select the correct resolution for your particular LCD screen -- for instance mine is 1280x1024. Otherwise you get a large black border on your screen. The monitor horizontal sync range is 31.5-64.3, the vertical sync range is 50-70. To get the display power saving to behave, add:

Option "DPMS"

to the monitor section of xorg.conf.

+ XVideo works, which means that you can play VCDs or other video "full screen". This includes DVDs if you have a DVD player. XVideo (XV) is *the* decider on whether video can be played easily, so this is a very good thing indeed. Only problem, and it is not the fault of Linux, that with only 8Mb of Video RAM, XVideo will only work up to 1024x768. If your screen is 14.1" and designed for 1024x768 then you are absolutely fine. But with a 1280x1024 LCD you have to play with the video modes a bit. According to the program "xvinfo" (try it in a terminal) XVideo on my laptop works with 16bpp colour depth. So I use 1024x768x16. I created a new, second layout in my xorg.conf listing just this mode because doing Ctrl, Alt, +/- doesn't change the virtual screen from 1280x1024 (using up the required Video RAM). In xorg.conf:

1) Copy your existing Screen section, and paste it so that you have two Screen sections. Change the identifier of the second one to something like "ScreenCinematic". For "ScreenCinematic", set the DefaultDepth to 16. In the Depth 16 Subsection "Display", change the Modes to:

Modes "1024x768"

2) Copy your existing Layout section, and paste so that you have two Layout sections. Change the *second* layout section so that the identifier is something like "CinematicLayout" and the Screen is your new "ScreenCinematic" that you created in 1).

3) Your usual layout will not have been affected, you can start a new X Windows session with:

startx -- :1 -layout CinematicLayout

Remember, this is only required when you are using a 1280x1024 LCD screen with no more than 8MB Video RAM.

+ Sound card supported by ALSA, but takes a little work. If you use a 2.6 kernel, you should be able to detect the settings automatically with alsaconf. But with the 2.4 kernel I find alsaconf hangs every time. Note, you may want to blacklist the cs46xx and snd-cs46xx modules, which most distros initially detect the sound card as. Then set up snd-cs4236. For my particular Thinkpad:

modprobe snd-cs4236 isapnp=0 port=0x530 cport=0x538 irq=5 fm_port = 0x220 dma1=1 dma2=0 mpu_port=-1

If you run alsaconf on the 2.6 kernel instead, you will still have to add the fm_port option to your modprobe.conf.

ISA PnP is quirky on the Thinkpad 770X, it doesn't detect anything in Linux and snd-cs4236 will fail if you try to use it. As you can see I've disabled the mpu_port because I can't use it on the laptop - it doesn't physically exist as far as I know!

The fm synth is often overlooked. It provides midi sounds through your speaker without using a software synth like TiMidity++. However your fm port will be silent until you load up your sounds with the ALSA sbiload program (in the alsa-tools package which you may need to download seperately).

Obtaining alsa-tools 1.0.6 is quickest -- it comes with the sound patches std.o3 and drums.o3. But I have used sbiload 1.0.5 and obtained the sounds seperately. For alsa-tools 1.0.5:

/usr/bin/sbliload -p 65:0 --opl3 /usr/share/sounds/opl3/std.o3 /usr/share/sounds/opl3/drums.o3

You may need to change the directory names to where you put your sound files. For alsa-tools 1.0.6:

/usr/bin/sbiload -p 65:0 --opl3 -P /usr/share/sounds/opl3 std.03 drums.o3

The fm synth is low quality, but there is nothing like having a hardware midi synth available! As always with ALSA, don't forget to adjust your mixer levels or you won't hear any sound output.

+ Internal 56k WinModem supported! The ACP Mwave modem is supported in the kernel now. The MWave driver seems to work best if it is loaded as a module. You also need to compile and run the mwavem software daemon, available from IBM's website:

http://www-124.ibm.com/acpmodem/

mwavem is open source (GPL). Excellent! This is all that is required as long as your MWave modem has been enabled. Now, if it is disabled as mine was, apparently you can force the port and IRQ configuration, but I have had no success with this approach. Instead I downloaded a floppy diskette image with PS2, the Thinkpad configuration utility for DOS, on it. You can get it from:

http://www.baiti.net/tp770x/ps2.html

The Linux Thinkpad configuration utility doesn't seem to have the MWave configuration option, so I had to use this DOS disk. Unlike the website suggests, I didn't have to put my own copy of DOS on to the bootdisk. Linux users can simply use the usual dd command to copy the disk image to their floppy device, and windows users can use rawrite, and either should have a working DOS configuration disk! Run PS2 and enable the MWave modem.

The HOWTO for the IBM MWave modem is seriously out of date. As usual, they put lots of effort into the software itself but fail to document well. I find that the HOWTO just made me try things that weren't necessary. For instance running setserial is unnecessary and actually stops the modem from dialling successfully!

I have used the MWave modem successfully with the KDE's KPPP, and obtained speeds of about 45k. The Connections are reliable and responsive. Note the modem seems to be silent when dialling.

+ APM (Advanced Power Management) works great.

~ Things I haven't tested: RS232 and parallel port, IrDA, docking laptop, external display.

Summary: everything works, but perhaps a little effort is required.. I hope this review helps. Good luck, and enjoy!