I lost my beloved T60 a few days ago and decided to not replace it with another. I wanted a wide screen laptop and I like Thinkpads. Same time I did not want to spend a lot so started hunting around. The Lenovo G550 looked like a great value and I found a few success stories like here with it. It came with Windows 7 something on it which never even booted. I installed Karmic on it right after unboxing it. Here are some basic field notes about the experience.
- Installation – graphical installation works quite well on this laptop. Just run the installer, set the options, off it goes.
- Configuration of X, networking, wifi, wired – All just works but wifi you have to add proprietary drivers. The display is beautiful and the screen aspect ratio is a thing of wonder to someone that had square screens for a long time.
- Mouse, ports, keyboard – I don’t like the touchpad much. Not sensitive enough to the touch and it drags. There are not enough usb ports. C’mon Lenovo give us some more here!
- Webcam – Works with Linux and skype. No problem. Just install “cheese” with an apt-get install.
- Suspend to RAM or Hibernation – So this works out of the box for me. Before had to upgrade BIOS revisions. Now it just works.
The laptop is a nice value-line type of beast. It has a nice finish. Not glossy or shiny. I like the “dull finish”. If you want a $500.00 US laptop that runs Ubuntu, has decent hardware, and seems to be built decently; take a look at my link to the amazon page. It performs well enough with the default cpu and memory to not need additional. I run VirtualBox and have a Windows7 guest that I use with outlook primarily. All works fine.
