Howdy stranger!
This is the 3rd thinkpad I've owned. I previously owned a T440s, and currently have a X61. I gave my T440s to my little brother, and found this beast at a tech recycling plant near my house. The price on these are interesting....
On amazon, a used one goes for around 250$. On ebay, they go for around 279$. I only payed 143$ at some tech recycling plant I live by. I got this shit for a steal. Yeah its not in the best condition cosmetic wise, with some scuffs here and there, but the hardware is in prestine condition, and it could mayyyyybe use a new battery.
for all the nerds out there, here's the specs:
This beast was released in 2010, and still competes with todays paper thin, powerful, and battery efficient laptops. Now this laptop is quite a hefty fella. When I say its a big boy, its a big boy. This was advertised as a workstation laptop, capable of running video editing software, photoshop, and browsing the web... all at the same time! Now you may be thinking, "well my phone can do that and more... thats not impressive" And your right. Tech has come a long way since 2010. But this was a game changer back then. It was truly ahead of its time, and it still holds up with some of the high end laptop hardware today!
All used thinkpads (with windows installed) in my possesion will always experience one thing..... A fresh linux installation :) and of course im installing arch linux. Because who wouldnt? I also used the archinstall command to make the install a bit easier. I've done this in the past without the install command and holy moly its difficult, and time consuming. This new command they added is frowned upon in the arch community, but its super convenient so I dont care lol.
The install had a little hiccup, I couldnt get the wifi to work, so I had to do it old school and hook it up via ethernet.
Once the install finished, pretty much installed the same things from my previous thinkpad. Dwm, pcmanfm, and firefox. These are my go-to things for a fresh arch install. The rest I figure out on my own. I also write a bash script to check the battery percentage via cli, but thats about it. Here's the bash script for anyone that is curious.
#!/bin/bash
watch -n0 cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity
The first line basically just tells the computer what interpreter it needs to use in order to execute the script. This is a requirement for all bash scripts. without this, nothing you wrote will work. This is also reffered to as the "shebang".
The second line just tells the computer to watch the battery percentage in the "capacity" directory in real time. This also shows the current time and date.
but other than that.... Viola! Another thinkpad with arch installed. Now I can use it for all my nerdy stuff. And even do homework on it :)
--Duckyboy