Yesterday I received my IBM Thinkpad R50e. R50e is a solid IBM machine and cost me around £750. The specs are
Pentium M 735 1.7 GHz
RAM 512 MB
HD 60 GB
DVD-Writer
Mdm – LAN EN, Fast EN 802.11b, 802.11g – Centrino
15″ TFT XGA (1024 x 768)
It came preloaded with WinXP Pro. I made a recovery disc set of 7 discs and replaced WinXP Pro with Ubuntu Linux. Almost everything has worked out of box and it is nice to see that Ubuntu recognized the Wireless chip as well.
As I am writing this, another window on this box is running debootstrap to build a pure Debian Sarge system. Further plans are to install a Linux from Scratch system on this laptop.
I am still playing with it.