[wellylug] I picked up a Thinkpad T23, and I would like a few bits for it.

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Sat Apr 4 18:32:08 NZDT 2009


Bret Comstock Waldow <bwaldow at alum.mit.edu> writes:

> I picked up a Thinkpad T23, and I would like a few bits for it.
>
> It comes with XP, and I'll leave that on, as occasionally work has
> something for me to do at home, but like all my machines, it will boot
> into Linux primarily.

As "Atom Smasher" commented, make sure you check those license terms.
My understanding is, as he says, that the OEM license is not
transferable, so you would be breaking the license terms to keep using
it.

Others have told me, however, that those terms vary between OEMs, and
that they have recently been made more liberal — and I don't know if
that is retroactive or not.

> I want to make sure the hardware is sound before I think too much
> about anything else - but I have this nagging interest in Slackware
> (which I haven't used) or Gentoo (which I have).

[...]

> The wireless bits - pci card, antenna, etc.  I have PCMCIA adapters,
> but setting it up internally would be nice.

Be wary; I believe that predates the stupid wireless card lock-in stuff
in the BIOS, but just in case ... some Thinkpads will refuse to boot if
the PCI ID in your internal wireless mini-PCI card is not in a short
whitelist.

I believe workarounds (software-only modification of the BIOS or card)
are available, but since I always bought the wireless NIC with the
device I never had to worry.

Regards,
        Daniel



More information about the wellylug mailing list