Tower Of Power

Matt Kohut posted on the Lenovo corporate blogs a very good sign of industry Linux support.

According to Kohut, Lenovo will be expanding its Linux offerings not just by expanding their preloaded selection, but by porting the ThinkVantage software (their "Craplet but Not Craplet" driver/application suite) to Linux.

Normally all I see as far as far as industry Linux support goes is just installing Linux on a few machines, but not really expanding Linux itself (through drivers and software). I have high hopes (which will probably be dashed like they always are) for Lenovo's offerings as they intend to port their drivers and management software.

In a perfect world I would like to see open sourced applications centrally distributed by Lenovo for multiple distributions (they currently will only preload SLED). In a perfect world I see modularized drivers that would allow more savvy users to install a hard disk shock driver but write their own OS integrated interface, or a user would install Lenovo's interface.

I also see much potential for their port of their presentation mode software. Currently dual monitors in Linux is a bit of a bitch to deal with, and I can potentially see them develop an application that would be usable on other laptops for quickly setting the monitor out port to be an 800x600 desktop that Open Office or Totem would send their full screen output to. While from a business standpoint this is not so much of a smart move (a competitive advantage via exclusivity is lost), the Linux crowd tends to handsomely reward supportive companies that make moves like this with free press, referrals, and making their next purchase through these somewhat philosophically aligned companies. Given the Linux user is the guy 10+ people go to for hardware purchasing advice, the sheer scale of 100 techies telling 1000 people to buy Lenovo machines because of how impressed they are with their support of Linux can't hurt at all. One need only look at the gPC and how Walmart could not keep enough in stock.

Since the ThinkVantage software appears to be written in .NET 2.0 (the update utility requires .NET 2.0, so I think thats a reasonable assumption), maintaining ports should not be entirely difficult thanks to the inroads the Mono project has made. I would love to see care made to make native feeling ports of the software rather than just dumping the same interface their Windows counterparts use (e.g. splash screens are usually frowned upon in Linux software, especially with system utilities). Since SLED is now GNOME based, I'm really hoping that their team decided to go for GTK+ and sticking to Gnome HIG for their interface, however given that QT is more easily portable, I fear a nasty looking QT setup (Disclaimer: I dislike QT from a visual standpoint. It's a good toolkit but makes for an inconsistent, unpolished interface).

One fear I do have is seeing Lenovo attempting to reinvent the wheel with their suite. There are many things that Linux already does well that do not need yet another third party application attempting to perform from scratch. One in particular is the network-manager applet that installs with Gnome most of the time. I find it to be an extremely easy to use wireless and network configuration utility, especially when you expand it with VPN plugins.

However I can see Lenovo stretching itself too thing trying to do a 1:1 port of the ENTIRE suite when they are better off ensuring packages like network-manager and power-manager from the gnome desktop or their KDE equivalents are installed and focusing their time on missing features, like easy fingerprint setup (perhaps contributing to the gnome keyring manager by allowing it to authenticate through PAM, allowing for finger swipes to unlock the keyring), hard disk shock protection (completely lacking on this aspect), presentation manager, and setting up and providing quick interfaces to all the special keys and shortcut buttons (namely the ThinkVantage and forward/back buttons do not work out of box). The could also spend their time contributing wifi drivers (or contributing to existing drivers) to fix some issues like the wifi light not working, as well as working with the major distributions to eventually work in the fixes they create to allow Suspend to RAM and Suspend to Disk to operate without dying.

As a final request and hope, please make sure you not only provide binary packages, but APT/YUM repositories as well for keeping the applications up to date (the update software can easily be reduced in complexity by using built in package management software).

All and all, my hat is off to Lenovo for taking the extra step in their Linux support by (potentially) supporting the community, not just installing a distribution and calling it a day.