As of Kubuntu Maverick 10.10, everything works out of the box or with minor workarounds. The two things that need workarounds are backlight control and ExpressCard hotplugging.
Intel Core 2 Duo “Merom” with Socket P T5250/T5450/T5550/T5750/T5800/T5850/T7100/T7300/T7500/T7700/T7800: 1.5 GHz - 2.6 GHz, 800/667 MT/s FSB, 4/2 MiB On-Die L2 Cache
Intel Core 2 “Penryn” for Santa Rosa platform: T8100/T8300/T9300/T9500: 2.1 GHz - 2.6 GHz, 800 MT/s FSB, 6/3 MiB On-Die L2 Cache
various compatible Celeron and Pentium processors…
Screen
12.0” WXGA (1280 x 800)
Graphics
Intel GMA X3100
RAM
2 slots for SODIMM DDR2-SDRAM,
up to 4GiB by specs,
up to 8GiB by reports
HDD
SATA 1.5Gbit/s; ships with 80GB to 250GB - 5400rpm
Optical Drive
ATA slim, ships with Toshiba-Samsung Storage Corp. TS-L632H
accepts other optical drives as well as HDD caddies
Wired Conectivity
1Gbps Ethernet by Marvell 88E8055
56k modem
Wireless Connectivity
ships with Intel 3945 or 4965
Option GTM 378 3G modem
no BIOS lock, so other WLAN/WWAN cards work, but may have incompatible LED indication or radio killswitch
Bluetooth v2.0 by internal USB dongle
Some versions of intel driver stretch lower resolutions across the entire screen, others keep the aspect ratio and put black bands around the sides as default. You can change the behaviour by setting the “scaling mode” property.
Backlight control requires workaround. See below.
Supported by sky2 driver, which is not included in old Ubuntu's (8.04) initrd image, which prevents netbooting. Doesn't affect an installed system or liveCD/liveUSB, and later versions work fine.
Wireless
Yes
Intel 4965 needs kernel 2.6.24 or compat-wireless to work
Bluetooth
Yes
Implemented as an internal USB dongle. Radio killswitch “disconnects” this dongle.
56K Modem
Not Tested
USB
Yes
Card Reader
Yes
Implemented as a USB mass storage device. Can be used to boot the computer.
ExpressCard Slot
Partial
Workaround needed to make PCIe ExpressCards work with hotplugging. See below.
Camera
Yes
Foxlink FO13FF-65-1 PC-CAM is a USB Video Class device - uses uvc driver.
“Slow” ExpressCards such as 3G modems use USB and work out of the box. “Fast” ExpressCards such as SATA controllers use PCIe which needs its link set up either by ACPI (this doesn't work in Linux) or by OS (this works, but needs to be enabled). To fix this issue, you need to add “pciehp.pciehp_force=1” to the kernel command line. In Ubuntu and other distributions using Grub2, the best way to do this is to edit /etc/default/grub and add it to the default options:
The BIOS in this machine is rather buggy and sometimes after changing the configuration in BIOS setup (especially that regarding the internal peripherals) the laptop doesn't behave according to the config or exhibits problems suspending or waking up from suspend. This problem is usually fixed by resetting the BIOS setup to defaults, rebooting a setting it up once afterwards.
Older distributions such as Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 have problems detecting and switching between headphone output and internal speaker. You can fix this by compiling alsa (needs to be done on every kernel update)
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