Fedora 34 Works on a T500

[John Mellor]

Kudos to the Fedora 34 and Gnome teams!!!

My Lenovo Thinkpad T500 runs Linux very well.  Its a beat-up, 
12-year-old, well-equipped dual-core laptop with 8GB ram, a Core2 Duo 
cpu with an AMD Rv635 gpu.  Its a good machine for meetings, as it is 
quite rugged and mostly survives being dropped, coffee spills, etc.  
Best of all, its highly secure with hardware that is not subject to the 
problems related to later-generation Intel processor design faults, etc.

Fedora 24 through 32 just worked on this laptop.  Updates were almost 
seamless, and all was good.

Early Fedora 33 was a big disappointment, as it had serious font issues 
in the message dropdowns and other places that made it semi-unusable, 
and with later updates it would not even show a Gnome screen.  I 
reinstalled it several times to confirm that the hardware was ok.  I 
could never find any logs detailing why it didn't work, so I switched to 
installing Ubuntu 20.10 as working much more correctly on this hardware 
with the same version of Gnome.

Last week I did a fresh install of Fedora 34 pre-beta, and it just 
worked.  It continues to work with the hundreds of updates that are 
being pushed.  Fedora is back.  Thanks!

[Sam Varshavchik]

John Mellor writes:

>  Kudos to the Fedora 34 and Gnome teams!!!
>
>  My Lenovo Thinkpad T500 runs Linux very well.  Its a beat-up, 12-year-old,  
>  well-equipped dual-core laptop with 8GB ram, a Core2 Duo cpu with an AMD  
>  Rv635 gpu.  Its a good machine for meetings, as it is quite rugged and  
>  mostly survives being dropped, coffee spills, etc.  Best of all, its highly  
>  secure with hardware that is not subject to the problems related to later- 
>  generation Intel processor design faults, etc.
>
>  Fedora 24 through 32 just worked on this laptop.  Updates were almost  
>  seamless, and all was good. 
Old Thinkpads are absolute joys to have. Ditto for my 10-year old W520.  
Built like a tank. I expect it to outlive me. I ran on it Fedora since it  
was brand new, whatever version was circa 2012.

The only maintenance I ever did was buy a replacement battery packs a few  
times (it's always plugged in, so the batteries don't get much wear and  
tear) and replace the keyboard when the original one's keys started to stick  
(a laughably easy process). It still has its original hard drive, spinning  
its rust away. I'm pretty sure a typical SSD's built-in suicide clock  
would've went off a long time ago. Every pixel on the 1920x1080 display is  
doing its job.

>  Early Fedora 33 was a big disappointment, as it had serious font
> issues in  
>  the message dropdowns and other places that made it semi-unusable, and with  
>  later updates it would not even show a Gnome screen.  I reinstalled it  
>  several times to confirm that the hardware was ok.  I could never find any  
>  logs detailing why it didn't work, so I switched to installing Ubuntu 20.10  
>  as working much more correctly on this hardware with the same version of  
>  Gnome. 
You could've tried Fedora's XFCE spin, instead.

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2021 at 19:35, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam(a)courier-mta.com&gt; wrote:

>  John Mellor writes:
>
>  > Kudos to the Fedora 34 and Gnome teams!!!
>  >
>  > My Lenovo Thinkpad T500 runs Linux very well.  Its a beat-up,
>  12-year-old,
>  > well-equipped dual-core laptop with 8GB ram, a Core2 Duo cpu with an
>  AMD
>  > Rv635 gpu.  Its a good machine for meetings, as it is quite rugged and
>  > mostly survives being dropped, coffee spills, etc.  Best of all, its
>  highly
>  > secure with hardware that is not subject to the problems related to
>  later-
>  > generation Intel processor design faults, etc.
>  >
>  > Fedora 24 through 32 just worked on this laptop.  Updates were almost
>  > seamless, and all was good.
>
>  Old Thinkpads are absolute joys to have. Ditto for my 10-year old W520.
>  Built like a tank. I expect it to outlive me. I ran on it Fedora since it
>  was brand new, whatever version was circa 2012.
>
>  The only maintenance I ever did was buy a replacement battery packs a few
>  times (it's always plugged in, so the batteries don't get much wear and
>  tear) and replace the keyboard when the original one's keys started to
>  stick
>  (a laughably easy process). It still has its original hard drive,
>  spinning
>  its rust away. I'm pretty sure a typical SSD's built-in suicide clock
>  would've went off a long time ago. Every pixel on the 1920x1080 display
>  is
>  doing its job.
>  
My workplace bought Thinkpads in bulk.   They lasted well, but the spinning
disks didn't last (for our disk intensive workloads -- video, satellite
imagery) and
the site was dusty due to construction making it necessary to open them up
periodically and clean out the cooling system with canned air).   IT bought
replacement disks in bulk and would replace them when systems failed to
boot.    Swapping disks was easy, but I had to boot linux a few times to
rescue
files from systems that had files that hadn't yet been backed up when they
failed to boot.


>  > Early Fedora 33 was a big disappointment, as it had serious font
> issues
>  in
>  > the message dropdowns and other places that made it semi-unusable, and
>  with
>  > later updates it would not even show a Gnome screen.  I reinstalled it
>  > several times to confirm that the hardware was ok.  I could never find
>  any
>  > logs detailing why it didn't work, so I switched to installing Ubuntu
>  20.10
>  > as working much more correctly on this hardware with the same version
>  of
>  > Gnome.
>
>  You could've tried Fedora's XFCE spin, instead.
>
>
>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct:
>  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam on the list, report it:
>  https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
>  

-- 
George N. White III