Review of LinuxCertified LCTP60 Laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T60p) with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and Windows Vista Business

Brian Smith
brian.geary.smith (at) gmail (dot) com

Why I got this laptop

I was primarily looking for a new laptop because I wanted to update to state-of-art operating systems. I wanted a Linux friendly laptop, as that is my primary operating system. Lenovo Thinkpad T60p has been mentioned at several places (including Linux Journal) as a very Linux friendly laptop. I wanted Linux pre-installed and configured for me, so I went with LinuxCertified's LCTP offering - configured dual-booth with Ubuntu 7.04 and Windows Vista Business. My older laptop runs Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger), which I didn't want to upgrade for now.

So, why write a review for this laptop? Well, I thought there would be other folks who would be interested in a state-of-art laptop with state-of-art operating systems. I recently read an article comparing Vista with Ubuntu. Since, my laptop runs both, I may be able to provide an interesting perspective. Novell is running these “Hi I am Linux” spoof ads. So, what about my laptop? “Hi I am Linux.. err, I am PC.., ahem, I am Bi-OS!”.

So, far I worked with relatively small screen laptops, optimized for travel. This time I wanted a system which was more of a desktop replacement. I find the wide high-res screen of this laptop very useful for multi-tasking.

WSXGA+ allows for two browsers side by side
(click for high res image)

Ubuntu Desktop
(click for high res image)

Dual Boot Capability

My laptop powers up into Windows Boot Loader, gives option for Vista and Ubuntu (default), and then shows GRUB with couple of different boot options for Ubuntu. I asked LinuxCertified support why their engineers did it this way (instead of just using GRUB). They mentioned that in order for the ThinkVantage button to work the master boot record (MBR) had to be Windows boot configuration data (BCD) and not GRUB.

Laptop Specs

On Vista, I was surprised to find “Performance Information and Tools” under Control Panel bring up a window with a “score” of performance of my laptop! Here is what this tool said about this laptop:

Here is what I found in documentation about this Windows Experience Index:

The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer's hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a number called a base score. A higher base score generally means that your computer will perform better and faster than a computer with a lower base score, especially when performing more advanced and resource-intensive tasks. Each hardware component receives an individual subscore. Your computer's base score is determined by the lowest subscore. For example, if the lowest subscore of an individual hardware component is 2.6, then the base score is 2.6. The base score is not an average of the combined subscores. You can use the base score to confidently buy programs and other software that are matched to your computer's base score. For example, if your computer has a base score of 3.3, then you can confidently purchase any software designed for this version of Windows that requires a computer with a base score of 3 or lower. The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9. The Windows Experience Index is designed to accommodate advances in computer technology. As hardware speed and performance improves, higher base scores will be introduced. However, the standards for each level of the index stay the same. For example, a computer scored as a 2.8 will remain a 2.8 unless you decide to upgrade the computer's hardware.

I always find these attempts of simplifying performance numbers and comparisons quite useless (and funny) as every application and use case tends to have very different performance requirements and nuances. Anyway, 4.3 it is, the performance score of this laptop as far as Microsoft.

No such single number performance measure on Ubuntu. Here is what lspci shows:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller AHCI (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 71d4
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
15:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller

High level specs are available here. (Performance 15.4” unit)

Wireless (Vista and Ubuntu came out equal)

The laptop has Intel WLAN Card (3945ABG) and came pre-configured on both Ubuntu and Vista. No surprise on the Windows Vista. Easy to use interface detected and connected with the access point. Ubuntu detected several hot-spots around my apartment, and connected seamlessly to mine after I provided the WEP key. Much easier than my experience on Breezy Badger. I think this is a great step forward, as wireless support on Linux laptops has been touchy in the past. The interface on Ubuntu is now almost as slick and as easy to work with as the interface on Windows.

Power Management

Suspend/Resume is an area that I have struggled with in the past, especially with Linux (even with Windows once in a while). So, I wanted to check this one out. I was amazed to see how graceful suspend and resume was on Ubuntu – it suspended to memory and resumed within seconds of opening the lid or pressing on the power button (if the lid was already open). Wireless connection was automatically established on resume (although after several suspends and resume wireless connection seem to take a bit longer to reconnect). Graphics and 3D rendering worked flawlessly across resumes – I ran glxgears before suspending and gears kept on going smoothly after resume. It takes about 10 seconds to go from pressing Fn-F4 to the point that the fan turns off (suspend state). Resume took about 8 seconds to the point where mouse was functional again and an additional 8 seconds to get the wireless to re-connect to my access point.

Battery Life (Vista wins here!)

I recently read that battery life can vary between Windows and Linux on the same laptop. So, out of curiosity, I decided to do battery test on both operating systems. My battery test basically involved doing my day to day activities on the laptop and clocking the uptime from 100% full to no-juice-left.

I would describe the load during these tests as medium. I wasn't doing intense CPU intensive work like compiling during this time, however I didn't leave the laptop idle either. I had few browser windows open. One of them on gmail (which keeps the window and network active). Other activities included editing text files (including this review in Open Office), several web activities etc.

When I took the power out, the screen dimmed down to preserve the battery. It was a bit too dim for my taste, and I brightened the screen to a fairly high level. Not sure how significant a factor this is when it comes to battery life, but I may have used the battery a bit faster than normal because of this.

The battery I got is a 9-cell Li-Ion battery. Here is how the battery information looks in /proc :

root@lc2000:~# cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info 
present:                 yes
design capacity:         84240 mWh
last full capacity:      87920 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          10800 mV
design capacity warning: 4396 mWh
design capacity low:     200 mWh
capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
model number:            42T4511
serial number:           35172
battery type:            LION
OEM info:                SANYO

So, with Ubuntu on above conditions, I clocked battery life to be 2 hours and 45 minutes. My initial thoughts were: not stellar but not too bad for a 15.4” high-res laptop with T7200 processor and 2GB memory. Well, then I did the same experiment with Windows Vista:

So, I charged up the battery to 100% and booted into Vista. I had copied this review file in a shared partition (I had requested LinuxCertified to create a shared FAT partition which I could access read and write from both Vista and Ubuntu). After taking the power out, I went about doing similar tasks as above on Vista. I loaded Open Office 2.2 so, I could work on this review without changing the format etc. Open Office 2.2 installation went pretty smoothly (I wasn't sure if Vista had broken Open Office for any reason). This was the very first time I had booted into Vista, so system did some initial work (got me to register on lenovo.com etc.). Well, the battery life with Vista under this medium load came to 4 hours and 40 minutes – almost two hours more than Ubuntu!!

So, why did Ubuntu use up battery so much faster than Vista? One guess is that Vista scales the CPU to lower speeds than Ubuntu. I noticed that on Ubuntu the processor was running at 1 GHz (instead of the peak 2 Ghz). I couldn't find a tool to watch current CPU speed on Vista. But this is just speculation – perhaps Vista is optimizing somewhere else. I did see some other postings talking about this same behavior, but no real explanations.

I looked into this more, and one of the configuration parameters I found in the bios is: “Mode for Battery”. One of the options for this parameter is “Maximum Battery” (Previously it was set for “Automatic”). I set that and did the same experiment again with Ubuntu. Well, this time around I got 3 hours and 34 minutes. There was another option for this parameter “Optimized for Battery”. I couldn't find documentation on what is the difference between these two settings. My guess is that in both settings, CPU is pinned to low frequency and may be some other components are set to lower performance. This makes things better, but clearly Windows Vista does a better job of managing the battery.

Hopefully this gets better over time. I can live with it though. I am far more productive on Linux than on Windows anyway, so I can get lot more done in the shorter time that I get with Ubuntu. Also, my primary use for Windows is entertainment, e.g. watching a DVD on a coast-to-coast flight. So, having better battery life on Windows serves me well.

Both Ubuntu and Vista took me into suspend state before the battery got completely exhausted. Both of them were able to successfully put me in the same state where I left off (no loss of data in editors etc) after I resumed with power plugged in.

Fingerprint scanner (Ubuntu wins here!)

Laptop came with a fingerprint scanner. My initial assumption was that this component will likely work well with Windows and will require some tinkering with Linux. I was surprised. LinuxCertified documentation had a note on how to set up a user with fingerprint login. I added fingerprint for my username (using tf-tool), and I was able to login using my fingerprint scan! On the flip side, I wasn't able to figure out how to setup a user on Vista with fingerprint based authentication. There was a tool to test the scanner, which basically showed the actual fingerprint on the screen – but no obvious way on associating a user with their scan.

(USB based) Webcam (Ubuntu = Windows)

I decided to give my old webcam a shot on the laptop (again one area where I have had issues on Linux in the past). I watched system log as I plugged in the camera and got following output:

May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.404000] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: Philips webcam module version 10.0.12 loaded.
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: Supports Philips PCA645/646, PCVC675/680/690, PCVC720[40]/730/740/750 & PCVC830/840.
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: Also supports the Askey VC010, various Logitech Quickcams, Samsung MPC-C10 and MPC-C30,
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: the Creative WebCam 5 & Pro Ex, SOTEC Afina Eye and Visionite VCS-UC300 and VCS-UM100.
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: Logitech QuickCam 4000 Pro USB webcam detected.
May  3 21:18:08 lc2000 kernel: [167529.424000] pwc: Registered as /dev/video0.
May  3 21:18:09 lc2000 kernel: [167529.568000] usbcore: registered new interface driver Philips webcam
May  3 21:18:09 lc2000 kernel: [167529.844000] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

A quick check with lsmod confirmed that drivers got loaded. So, I looked for a webcam application. Couldn't find any pre-loaded. So, I searched for “webcam” in “Add/Remove Applications” and found an application called “Camorama” with following description: Camorama is a small utility to view, alter and save images from a webcam or a Video4Linux device. It can apply a number of image filters and make remote captures. Installed Camorama, launched it, and boom I can see myself! Cool Stuff.

Experience on Windows Vista was pretty much similar. Plugging in the camera downloaded the driver and logitech application. However, I had to reboot Vista before getting Logitech application to launch.

Performance Tests

I don't have a formal way to benchmark performance of a laptop. I focused only on Ubuntu for performance testing – as thats where I plan to do heavy duty stuff. One activity that I think comes close to measuring the performance is downloading the latest kernel and compiling it – it tests out cpu, memory and disk performance. So, I downloaded recently released 2.6.21.1 kernel from kernel.org and compiled it.

I downloaded the kernel over my wireless network (via home DSL), while the laptop was running on battery. 42MB of kernel took approximately 3 minutes to download at a sustained bandwidth of approximately 200KB/sec.

I switched to power a this point so the laptop can give the maximum power to next steps:

Uncompressing the 42MB bzip2 file (243MB uncompressed) took 14.5 seconds. Extracting the files from uncompressed archive took 3.34 seconds.

I found several packages to be missing in order to compile the kernel. A quick search through the Ubuntu forums gave me a list of packages that I needed to install:

# apt-get install build-essential libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

These in turn installed several dependencies. Not sure if I needed everything above, but I was too lazy to eliminate stuff.

Then I ran “make xconfig” and just saved the default .config it came with (i.e. didn't change any configuration – wanted to see the compilation time with as standard configuration as possible).

Now to the most interesting step: “make bzImage” took only 5 minutes and 19 seconds. So far, I was used to 20+ minutes for this particular process – this validated why I purchased this laptop in the first place. Note that I didn't do any tuning to make this step go faster, and I continued to work productively on other things on the laptop while this compilation was taking place. I decided to dig into multi-processor performance of the system. Way back when I had tried to use multi-processor capabilities on a hyperthreaded CPU, I didn't see significant gains in performance at that time. But this is a true dual core system. So, I tried “make -j 2 bzImage”. To my surprise, this took only 3 minutes and 29 seconds!

I am not a games junkie to comment a whole lot on the graphics speed. Default run of glxgears, without any optimization, gave 2700 Frames Per Second. I think pretty good.

hdparm shows buffered disk read speed to be close to 44 MB/sec. I used “hdparm -t /dev/sda” which gives the speed of reading through the buffer cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. This measurement is an indication of how fast the drive can sustain sequential data reads under Linux, without any filesystem overhead. The measured number is mid way between my previous laptop and my desktop. So, not bad.

Size

I used to be able to force fit a 15” laptop in my bag made for 14” laptops. Can't do that with this 15.4” (wide screen) laptop. Need to look for a bag which is appropriate for this notebook.

Laptop takes up most of the tray in the economy class seats of flights. So, if you want to have a drink, have it before turning up your notebook, or hope that the seat besides you is empty. The 9 cell battery does add weight and size to the laptop (it juts out about half a inch in the back). If you would primarily be using the laptop plugged into power, I would suggest getting a spare 6 cell battery as well.

Summary

Ubuntu 7.04: I am and remain Ubuntu fan. I did get this feeling that Ubuntu was trying to get to the novice Linux user at slight expense of the power Linux users. While it is no way close to dumbing down as in Linspire, but I am worried that it may go down that path. For now, I was able to figure out to get around the limitations and configure the system the way I wanted. Hopefully, Ubuntu developers will figure out how to attain the goal of attracting new Linux user while keeping experienced Linux users happy (not an easy goal).

Vista: Nothing significant to add here. I was happy to see that I could install key applications like OpenOffice 2.2 without any issues. Although I couldn't install some system level utilities which I had used on XP, e.g. SpeedswitchXP. I did find Windows Aero a pleasant to use interface. The graphics performance, screen size and quality and display resolution of this laptop are ideally suited for a desktop environment like Aero. I found Windows desktop by default to be too “Lenovo-ized”. Not only the backgrounds options were only related to Lenovo or Thinkpad, there was much deeper integration. There is a Lenovo “gadget” on the upper right showing various Lenovo products. In the power management menu, a click on “Buy a Battery” goes to Lenovo's store on the web.

A snapshot of Vista default settings on the laptop with Lenovo store connections
(click for high res image)

I will refrain from giving a “score” to the laptop. Just like my aversion to use a single number as an indicator of a system's performance, I don't think a score can tell you whether this laptop is good or not for your particular case. Overall, the laptop is absolutely solid – well built, professional look (I am old school when it comes to looks) with great performance. This is not a “PDA replacement” - i.e. if you are looking for a light laptop for heavy travel, then it may not be the best fit. On the other hand, it is a great fit for anyone looking to replace their desktop with a laptop, or anyone who wants a powerful laptop for development or sysadmin purposes.

This Review: My original thinking was to shop this review around with some online publications. But as I wrote more, I decided that I wanted to make this more of a living document and publish at some place that I can update easily. I was also not able to test everything in the time I had set to write this. If you have any suggestions for improvements, corrections or if you would like me test anything specific, please send an email to brian.geary.smith (at) gmail (dot) com.