I had a little time, and I was getting fed up with the slowness of Vista on my X60, which is now three years old. It runs fine once it’s booted, but it’s the boot process that’s annoyingly slow.. and with the battery starting to die, I have to cold boot more and more.

Anyhow, I knew Intrepid still didn’t quite have everything, so I decided to update to the late-alpha-status Jaunty.

Suprisingly, things are working quite well at the moment. Three big missing features are now available (with some work, of course):

• Trackpoint wheel emulation. You can turn it on using the xinput driver, and the configuration finally seems to persist reliably across suspend and resumes. I still have to turn it on with a script:

  #!/bin/sh
  DEVICEID=5
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation" 8 1
  xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Evdev Wheel Emulation Button" 8 2
  xinput list-props $DEVICEID
  

  Where DEVICEID is something I get from the output of xinput list

• HDAPS, yes disk parking that’s been in thinkpads since forever, FINALLY, works. A little extra work required however. In this case:
  • Get the tp_smapi out-of-tree driver from upstream. I tried building it with Ubuntu’s module-assistant, but it doesn’t seem to build the right hdaps driver there. With the upstream version, you can just type make load HDAPS=1 and it will load the driver.
  • Grab hdaps source from here. Yep it’s just a .c file. You need to get 20081004 or later. Compile it using gcc, and name the output hdapsd. You can launch it like: sudo hdapsd -d sda -s 15

  And voila! disk parking! I can verify it works by runing du from /usr and watching the output stop and start as I shake the laptop. Cool. About fricking time.

• The machine doesn’t get retardedly hot. The bottom side still gets a tad warm while plugged in, but the top side doesn’t get unbearably warm like it used to. While on battery, temperature is just fine.