Had this thing for over a year, and tried many distros trying to get the right one. Most failed on install unless I turned off ACPI.

Fedora Core 3 got most of the hardware right, but Suse 9.3 Pro rocks on this one. The modem actually works on the default install, first time ever for this thing. In fact all the hardware works out of the box, except:

1. Before first boot, set acpi=off as a kernel option in the boot loader, otherwise it won't boot at all. ACPI is seriously broken in this laptop, some people have battery and cpu info out of it but noone I know of has suspend or hibernate working. There's no APM.

2. Most distros don't have modem drivers, only Suse 9.3 so far.

Note that this laptop has no APM, so with ACPI off, there's no chance of sleep on closing lid, etc.

I used swsusp, but after resume, USB fails completely. If/when I get a chance to fix it I'll post a howto, unless someone else is generous enough to beat me to it.

Overall not a good choice for a Linux fan, I'm quite disappointed in IBM with this one but I guess it was cheap so I should quit complaining and enjoy that it's performance is OK.

well well
DRI ok
does not need acpi=off as a kernel parameter once service acpi off

swsusp write to disk, when rebooting load pages and then fails and reboot by itself

kernel includes the ibm-acpi module, but not playing nice.

oh, yes load thermal module will crash laptop

Bad acpi...

Tried to compile kernerl and change options, so far no luck

Found some info with google.
Would love to get swsup to work.
acpi=off needed with debian test (etch I think)
For the rest it is ok

acpi nearly working IBM thinkpad R40e 2684HVG no Fn key working, throttling OK
see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=449647

If anybody is interested, I have summarised all the ACPI info in the above thread. ACPI can be made to work, not all of it, but it is probably not too far. With a few of us looking at it, we should be able to...