Just wrapped up testing an off-lease ThinkPad X13 Yoga Gen 2 vs modern sub-£200 Chromebooks. It’s wild how much plastic e-waste retail stores sell at that price point when off-lease enterprise gear running Linux blows them out of the water.

Anyone else running off-lease ThinkPads for lightweight mobile setups? (Dropped a quick 2-min video spec comparison if anyone's looking at cheap refurb gear right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Pw2cBKpfs)

Updated my firmware on my thinkpad t580. This made my external battery (3rd party) jump from 64.8 Wh design capacity to 40.4 Wh design capacity (but the computer doesnt turn off when it is "empty", this is a software bug).

AI's theory: The firmware update made the system stricter towards 3rd party batteries, blocking it and reporting a dummy number. This is plausible because after the firmware update the battery is no longer reporting its mAh (used to display 6000 mAh).

Rolling back to my previous firmware version (which is supported on thinkpads via fwupd downgrade) didn't fix it...

Has anyone experienced something similar? I also tried downgrading my kernel (hoping that an older kernel wouldn't suffer from this for some reason) but it didn't fix it.

Guesses or fix ideas that might break something are also welcome, I'm using NixOS.

Update: ran tlp recalibrate, still stuck at 40.4 Wh design, for some reason says 45.15 Wh current capacity. Before this both design and current capacity were 64.8 Wh.

The computer originally had Windows 98 installed on it, but when booting it would give a blue screen of death. I've tried a number of things to try and get this laptop working again:

1. I tried reinstalling Windows 98 since I have the original official disk, after the install and reboot the system displayed the error: "Invalid system disk Replace the disk, and then press any key" I don't know what it means by "system disk"

2. I tried installing Devuan daedalus, the last 32 bit version of the operating system. It failed.

3. I tried installing a really old Linux, Fedora 3. The installer ran successfully enough that the hard drive partitions and names appear on other Linux environments, but the system shows the error "Operating System not found"

4. I booted up TinyCore linux, which successfully runs as a live environment from RAM. It was the one that detected the previous partitions created by the Fedora installer. It also cannot install onto the hard drive (some USB error? I'm using DVD so idk what that's about). I ran fsck successfully once, it told me the hard drive is dos paritioned. So fdisk -l detects Linux partitions, fsck detects dos, what is going on?

5. I tried SystemRescueCD, which crashed with a kernel panic.

Is anyone familiar with the ins and outs of an IBM Thinkpad T20? Does anyone know what the "Invalid system disk" error is about, it does not show up in any user manuals I found online. Does anyone know how to get any operating system working on one of these, or a way I can atleast definitively diagnose the issue?

First Lemmy post :D

I joined a new company a year ago. They had a very limited laptop choice, so I settled on an X12 tablet. (I lug my laptop frequently, so I wanted something light.) But then I discovered ctrl/fn switching is only doable via a Windows app. So I decided to try Windows again for a while.

But I grew increasingly frustrated with Windows (but reversed ctrl/fn frustrates more), so I started fiddling with capturing USB packets, and captured what the Windows software sends. But I failed to send the packets.

But then someone pinged me on the repo I had placed my captures in, that they'd written the program to send the packets.

Already too long story: I'm now a happy Linux user on the X12, posting the tool for more visibility.

My own experience has been wonderful. I've used ThinkPads with Linux for the past 15 years. Everything that I try works out of the box by default.

It is just wonderful experience. I have honestly nothing bad to say!

Does this sound like an advertisement?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/21857312

I'm looking to mainly use it for school and was wondering if there's any recommended distros out there for thinkpads.

Its a Lenovo Thinkpad T480.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1179690

I just did an apt update followed by an apt upgrade, and during the latter the screen went all blank with a blinking prompt. Unresponsive to keyboard and touchpad. I also hear the fans. It's been like this for 10 min now. I think some Nvidia drivers were included in the upgrade. What to do? Is it safe to emergency reboot? I appreciate any suggestions also for post-checks. Cheers!

Update: The suggestion by @[email protected] worked!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/942835

I've been hearing good things about Debian 12 and it was easier than ever to install on this old T61p.

Wanted to give Bookworm a test drive and happy to report it's smooth sailing using Gnome with a few tweaks from System76. Only took 8m 28s to compile pop launcher on the Core 2 Duo.

• pop-os/shell
• pop-os/cosmic-workspaces
• pop-os/launcher

...at least for X1 Extreme.

I for one was tired of Reddit. With the latest events it's good to look for alternatives. This community here is created in case the one(s) on Reddit disappear.

I'm not very interested in moderating; so to any old mods from Reddit: take over!