He said “there’s also Bluetooth there”, and I must say, I didn’t believe him at first as “lspci -v” didn’t find any Bluetooth hardware earlier when I ran the command, and the Bluetooth/modem card was originally optional. The funny thing is, the page did not mention it, but the laptop actually had Bluetooth in it! I didn’t know that either, until my husband unscrewed the back panel to install the new RAM stick and he noticed the modem/bluetooth card in there.

It features a modem port, an ethernet port, headphone/line-out, external microphone, infrared, expansion bus for IBM laptops, VGA-out, 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 SD slot, two generic USB 2.0 ports, and 1 IBM “USB” port (not compatible with most gadgets).

Other specs include: Intel PRO wifi chipset (fully supported by Linux out of the box), Intel graphics card, a 12.1″ XGA TFT screen, 512 MB RAM (Geeks sent us a 1 GB RAM upgrade too, reaching the overall RAM of 1.5 GB), fingerprint reader, a 1.8″ 60GB drive at 4200RPM. It uses a 1.50 GHz Pentium M processor with the Intel 915GM chipset. The X41 is small and light, weighing around 2.7 lbs with the 4-cell battery it came with.

This 2005-released IBM Thinkpad X41 laptop that sent us, a well-known shop for computer parts, is one of the best Linux-compatible laptops you can buy today for cheap. But truth is, even back in 1999 you could find super-lightweight laptops in the market (for the right price). It feels like the second coming of laptops in this netbook revolution. Acer Aspire One this, MSI that, Dell Mini 9 this, Asus that. Go on, go around these gadget sites and read all that talk about netbooks and what not.

Ubuntu fingerprint reader