Linux runs on Thinkpad T30s. Works great. Good machines. Buy one.
Everything works except for the WinModem. But ... why tie up your expensive CPU pretending it is an audio digital signal processor? Why connect your precious laptop to a lightning antenna such as a multi-mile-long phone wire? Buy a $40 PCMCIA card (I like the 3CCFEM556B) from Ebay for that.
I'm told the T30 came with Windows 2000 pre-infected. I pulled that drive as soon as I got it. The 20G hard drive is still sitting undisturbed and unread on a shelf. I neither signed or clicked any agreement not to read it, and while I assume the bits are copyrighted, they are not subject to any license I am party to.
I figure if anyone wants to pull those bits off and reverse-engineer them, without violating the copyright fair-use laws of their country, and they can provide a reasonably convincing argument from a U.S. attorney that I won't get in major trouble doing so, I might just be willing to give that unread hard drive a little trip elsewhere. But I worry that the DMCA might cause problems. Expert opinions welcome.
I will provide more information on running Linux on a T30 later. There are already some good pages out there. Check back in a month or two and hopefully there will be more usable information on this page.
last revision January 28, 2003