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.

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.

Lenovo, which years ago purchased IBM's personal computer business, appears to have quietly stopped offering Linux as a pre-installation option. None of the company's 49 ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebook models -- nor its many ThinkCenter and IdeaCenter desktops -- can currently be ordered with Linux.

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.

Finally got Ubuntu running on the T61P (which has assumed the name of my last laptop which is in the process of having the contents of its hard drive transplanted). I encountered some issues in the process of doing this.

Lenovo has announced the Skylight sub-notebook which uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip, runs Linux rather than Windows and will sell for around $499 (£308) when it goes on sale in April. Using the ARM chip architecture, Lenovo's Linux device represents a significant move away form the common Intel/Microsoft Windows model for computers.

With my older IBM ThinkPad R50e starting to show its age, I recently decided to upgrade to a newer ThinkPad, this time under the Lenovo name.

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.

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.