A funny sequence of events resulted in me trying a Thinkpad X40 as my work laptop (replacing the T41p that I had been using). The X40 is slower, has less HD space and a lower resolution screen, but it is smaller and lighter.

First job was to remove WIndoze XP and replace it with Fedora Core 4. That was painless (assuming you have the media tray piece that adds the optical drive). Getting some other things setup took a little longer. I ended up with the MadWiFi driver from their old sourceforge project CVS. Running on top of that is Devicescape‘s Secure Wireless Client (basically wpa_supplicant) and its associated GUI (seen in the screen shot).

I also have gdesklets to provide some desktop utilities like the calendar, world time clocks and Wi-Fi status indicator. And then the desktop wallpaper, which I got from a Novell site, and shows Tux trying to swat a Microsoft butterfly.