I got a new workstation last month, a laptop from the ThinkPad SL
series. The TuxMobil article
about installing Arch Linux on it
is here. Overall
it works good, but I soon regretted the decision to go with
Lenovo. The ACPI support is almost non-existent, none of the function
keys work, there's no bluetooth rfkill so it constantly draws power,
and the machine can't wake up from suspend.
It is my workstation, but still what use is a laptop without any power
management features? It's 2010, and I can barely comprehend the
suspend/hibernate situation in Linux. Last two years
with my
TravelMate have been a constant battle, 3 months of suspend
working, followed by periods when it was broken. Last of which is
especially ugly,
it breaks hibernation
for people with Intel graphics. Worst of all, in periods when it
was working you still couldn't suspend because you couldn't trust
it.
These machines actually have the IdeaPad firmware, which
rules out using thinkpad_acpi. Next up was
lenovo-sl-laptop,
a third party module which provides support for SL models, but only up
to SL500. Then I turned
to asus-laptop which
provides
official in-kernel
support for ThinkPad
SL. Unfortunately after
inspecting the DSDT developers concluded SL510 support is not
possible. These machines expose a wmi interface, but it's not
handled by any current module. Developing one will not be
easy.
I don't want to write to kernel mailing lists or Lenovo until I find
more owners of SL510, or some other model with the same
interface. Individually we could be ignored, together maybe we get the
ball rolling towards "lenovo-sl-wmi".