When IBM sold its personal computer division to Chinese PC maker Lenovo, one of the flagship products that went along on that sale was its invaluable ThinkPad notebook line, home of some of the best engineering I've seen in notebook PCs in the entire time they've been on the market. Now Lenovo is preparing to take the ThinkPad a step ahead and ship them with SUSE Linux preinstalled.

When we were looking at the Phoenix HyperSpace instant-on Linux environment, we had a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 in our testing labs for a few weeks. In this article we have some feedback on the T400 when it comes to Ubuntu Linux compatibility.

ThinkPad customers will soon have a new configuration option, as Lenovo and Novell have announced that the popular laptops will begin shipping with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED) preinstalled.

Lenovo seems to have a love/hate relationship with Linux. Last year, it began offering its high-end T60p ThinkPad laptop with SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). This year, the company is releasing its newest high-end laptop, the T61p ThinkPad, and once more, while it runs desktop Linux, the company isn't overly eager to let the world know about it.

This bloke is testing a Thinkpad t61 running SLED 10 and comparing the performance with a similar Microsoft installation. Pity he couldn't have used Kubuntu instead, and shown just what GNU/Linux can really do.

The VAR Guy runs hot and cold on Lenovo. One minute, he praises Lenovo’s ThinkPad brand. The next, he openly wonders if Lenovo can hold off rivals like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer. Plus, Lenovo’s server strategy — particularly as it relates to Linux — is nowhere to be seen.

For the last few months my Thinkpad has been, and still is, the host of several wonderful Linux distributions, all of them based on the new KDE 4 desktop environment. So, today, in mid summer 2009, is there still a reason to run a KDE 3 desktop? Well, if it wasn’t for PCLinuxOS I would have to say no.

Note to self... and anyone interested... Installing openSUSE 11.2 in a IBM thinkpad X40:

I use, on a daily basis, three different Linux distributions: MEPIS 6.5 and 7, OpenSUSE 10.3, and SLED 10 SP1. So, when I saw that Frank Ohlhorst, my colleague over at The Channel Insider, had gotten his hands on a ThinkPad T61 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1, I was interested in what he would find.