Just two days ago my new Thinkpad T400 arrived. I chose the base config with the WXGA+ LED screen option and webcam. In short, this thing is great.
After three years of a Macbook Pro (current and previous generation), it's good to be back to a thinkpad for development. The keyboard is amazing. Personally I really like the trackpoint, mouse button feel, and having 3 dedicated mouse buttons. This will be far better for programming and IDE environments etc.
Now to installing Ubuntu for dual-boot. Microsoft Windows 7 was preinstalled and I didn't want to remove it entirely. The Windows partition manager is a joke, skip right over it. It would only shrink the windows partition to ~80G even though only ~20G were used. So I installed Ubuntu via USB stick (more on that in a sec) and then used GParted. Note, you will also have to install ntfstools for GParted to be able to read and shrink the NTFS partition. After shrinking Windows to ~50G I actually installed Ubuntu a second time to make repartitioning easier.
For the Ubuntu install I had a 4G USB drive by OCZ. I used the Windows compatible uNetBootin program to copy the standard Ubuntu 9.10 ISO over to the drive and make it bootable. That took all of five minutes and was really easy. Simply plug the drive into the lenovo and on startup, hold down F12. Alternatively you can use the blue ThinkVantage button for a list of options. F12 lets you do a one-time boot from a different medium. Thanks Lenovo folks for doing this - so much more convenient than changing permanent BIOS options back and forth.
Live boot and install was amazingly smooth. It was the easiest and fastest OS install I've ever done. Out of the box, Ubuntu recognized all hardware on the T400 that I thought of testing. Webcam, High res screen, Trackpad with scroll areas, Wifi, Sound, Volume and Brightness controls, etc. Amazing. I connected to our home Wifi in a matter of seconds with great signal. The Installer runs from a shortcut on the live boot desktop and is very easy. It takes about 2 minutes of manual input (keyboard layout, timezone, etc), and then installs in about 10 minutes.
Later on I tried hibernation. It works!
In short:
Thinkpad T400 I give a rating of 9/10. The 1/10th ding is for a few creaky noises on opening the screen and carrying it. I hear this is normal so am not worried but, for example, the battery can jiggle a bit.
Ubuntu 9.10 I give 10/10. Amazing live install experience. I would recommend this to anyone. IMHO if you have a friend or family member who doesn't need MS Office or IE, I would now for the first time recommend Linux (Ubuntu) on the desktop.
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