03/14/2006: This is my Gentoo Linux page. I just created it today so I don't know what content will be going here yet.

How about first I start off with my compatibility list I've been working on for my IBM ThinkPad T42:

Software compatibility:

• Office Suite Compatibility - OpenOffice.org
• PDF Form fill-out - Acrobat Reader
• Waveform Editor - Audacity 1.3 Beta (I made a custom ebuild to get it to install.)
• AIM - gaim (File transfers still don't work to this day, but maybe someday they'll fix 'em!)
• Web - Firefox ('nuff said)
• E-Mail/Calendar - Evolution

Hardware compatibility:

• UltraNav - Limited support so far. I disabled the trackpad in the BIOS because it won't properly restore its state after hibernate. It forgets that the trackpad is supposed to have TAPPING DISABLED and I really hate "tapping." Too many accidental clicks happen that way. For now I have an xorg.conf that supports the TrackPoint stick, and a USB mouse correctly.
• ThinkLight - Completely BIOS controlled so it works perfect. I might add the gaim plugin to alert me to gaim messages by blinking the light - kinda a novel idea.
• Intel 2915ABG Triband WiFi Card - Have to make sure to emerge the version 2.4 firmware as the version 3 firmware won't work properly with this card. Hopefully whatever bug that's in version 3 will be fixed soon. In its current state it works well with most wireless networks, however if your network uses WEP encryption - the card will crash and reset a lot. Hurts throughput a little during the reset, but hopefully that bug will also be fixed in future.
• Intel Pro/1000 Ethernet - Works flawlessly
• USB 2.0 Ports - Work flawlessly
• Internal Modem - Untested but others have got it to work fine.
• Fingerprint Sensor - This is a BIIIIG heap of trouble. There are no official installers for it yet, so if you are going to use it in Linux you'll be doing a lot of manual configuration. I will be working on an ebuild - at least for my local install, and I should be able to post it here for others that want to use it. I guess getting it working for Linux authentication means hooking it into PAM - what a learning experience that will be... As long as you SET IT UP IN WINDOWS FIRST you can at least use the sensor for BIOS-level authentication - so all is not lost. Unfortunately I don't know of any way to initiate BIOS fingerprint authentication from Linux, so I would recommend setting up the fingerprint sensor before a Linux install if you plan on using it.
• TPM Security Chip - There have been some APIs and drivers written, but I can't even seem to get linux to talk to the chip yet - let alone find any practical use for it right now.
• Internal Bluetooth - If you have this daughtercard installed, it works just like any other USB HCI device. I will be (hopefully) compiling a list of scripts for various cell phone providers sometime soon to ease using this setup as a remote PPP connection.
• PC Card Slots - they work fine.
• UltraBay - Haven't set it up for hot-swap yet, so the kernel freezes if a drive is removed from the UltraBay. There are utilities available to activate UltraBay hot-swap so I should be hopefully setting that up to work soon.
• Active Protection System (Airbag Protection System) - The hard drive "airbag" system that senses the computer falling to it's death. I've found an alpha ebuild that properly parks the hard drive when it detects a shock. I will be hopefully installing this in the next few days.
• Access IBM and other IBM hotkeys - I've written a series of scripts that I will soon archive in a tarball and drop them somewhere on teh intarweb. They make these keys work like they do in Windows with the use of the IBM ACPI kernel module, radeontool, and some other basic linux tools.
• Intel Pentium M - Processor throttling - I haven't got this to work quite CORRECTLY yet, but I have got it to work using the cpufreqd and cpudyn packages. The wikis on laptop power management all say either one or the other will work, but I could only get dynamic processor throttling to work with both applications running. Unfortunately - the processor maxes out at 1.4GHz instead of 1.7 like it should, and when you shift it up to 1.7GHz manually, it will float back down to 1.4 after a few minutes. When it idles down it will still properly slow down to 600MHz so all is not lost I suppose.
• Suspend-to-Disk - Using Gentoo suspend2 sources and their hibernate script works great - other than my aforementioned issues with the UltraNav.
• Suspend-to-RAM - Not working so well yet. Generally the video BIOS corrupts when the system comes out of suspend - a glitch in the ATI drivers, both the closed-source ATI and the open-source radeon.