Experiences with F8T2 on Thinkpad T61

[Matthew Saltzman]

My T61 has the Nvidia Quadro NV140M video card.  I tested the x86_64
live dvd and installed the x86_64 DVD.  This message covers
platform-specific issues that I encountered.

Live DVD: 

- The DVD won't boot into X.  If I boot to runlevel 3 and attempt to
system-config-display, there are two problems.

(1) The Monitor section of xorg.conf is missing.
(2) The nv driver hangs with a black screen.  The keyboard is still
functional and I can reboot with <CTRL>-<ALT>-<F1> <CTRL>-<ALT>-<DEL>.

Hand-editing xorg.conf to create a Monitor section and using the vesa
driver restores X functionality.

- I used gparted to resize NTFS partitions and partition the drive.  It
hung at the end of the resize operation without confirming it is
finished (although the operation appears to have completed).  Also,
gparted quits after the rescan step after each operation set.

Installation:

- Have to install with "vesa" kernel option.  The nv driver boots to a
black screen.

- On the Disk Druid screen, the screen is not repainted after opening
and closing popups.

- The display is only configured for 800x600.

Post-Installation:

- Display issues (as above--nv driver and Monitor detection don't work).
The new nv drivers don't help.

- Screen brightness is erratic.  The screen brightness applet appears,
but whatever controls I hit, brightness changes randomly up or down and
does not get fully bright or dim.  If I switch to a VC, I can control
the brightness, but ^@ characters appear on the display.

- X server doesn't terminate on logout--I have to <CTRL>-<ALT>-<BKSP> to
kill it.

- Suspend doesn't work at all.  Select Suspend from the power applet and
the machine starts to suspend, the light comes on, then the light goes
off and the machine is live, except that the display is black.  I can
reboot as above.

- Hibernate appears to work, but on resume I get a message that
hibernate failed.

- Stopping the bluetooth service on reboot or shutdown fails, although
starting on bootup succeeds.  Have not tested bluetooth functionality
otherwise.

Can anyone confirm these behaviors and that they are bugs?  I'll file
them, if so.  Workarounds welcome too.

There are some other issues I'll post later, but they don't seem
hardware related.