Hello,
I am seriously considering getting the Lenovo ThinkPad x120e in the next few days for my upcoming trip.
What are people's experience with running a GNU/Linux distro on it? 802.11n wifi, graphics, Bluetooth, sleep/suspend, etc?
Any info would be helpful, thanks!

Hey there penyuan...

To answer your question there are many different factors to consider. The first thing that I would ask is which Linux distro are you thinking of running? After that you need to ask do you want 100% compatibility or do you just care about functionality and usable? As there are many factors to answer first you can always look to the HCL for the Linux Distro that you choose to run and this will tell you more than anything, if what you want to do will work.

I personally run openSuSE Linux and have found that it to run excellent on my HP G60 which of course is now 3 years old and I installed openSuSE on it as soon as it was out of the box as I hate Winblows.

1)So the things to look at is which Linux Distro?
2)Verify by looking at the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) http://linuxhcl.com/
openSuSE Linux: http://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Laptops or http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Hardware
Ubuntu Linux: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport
Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBM_ThinkPad_X120e

Hope this helps

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Hi!
Thanks for your comprehensive answer.

(1) I am thinking about running Fedora on the ThinkPad x120e.

(2) There doesn't seem to be any information on HCL.

And yes, I prefer as close to 100% compatibility as possible. Minimally, I prefer to have good support for: 802.11n wifi, GPU, Bluetooth, good power management (sleep/suspend, intelligent fan speed, battery conservation, hard disk spin down, etc.).

Would this be more appropriate for a Fedora forum?

Thanks!

To be honest from my understanding Fedora 14 had almost 100% support for that Thinkpad. I do believe that the issue was no sound card support. However, since it has been roughly a year since Fedora 14 was released they may have corrected the Sound Card issue with the release of Fedora 15... now Don't Quote me on that.


As for "Support" the Linux Community is for the most part "Open Source" and I will point out that yes there are a small number of manufacturers that have started building drivers for Linux,again this is a small number.

Now for the HCL. To best use the HCL or to get a better answer for Supported Hardware it's best to look at each individual piece of hardware. So with that said we will use my HP-G60 as an example when asking about Hardware support....

To answer your question in regards to posting in the Fedora Forum. That might help to answer the specific question about complete (100% hardware support) and possibly provide any work around needed.

I did find a couple of posts using Google running this search term:ThinkPad x120e fedora -- That show that Fedora 15 runs fine on that Thinkpad, but you may want to use either KDE, LXDE, or XFCE. I personally prefer KDE and do not really care for GNOME3.

Here is a forum post for the Thinkpads, that might help you out:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=99500

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