IBM ThinkPad TT1L7UK

IBM's ThinkPad T21 Series notebooks are smart, svelte, matt-black portables with mobile Pentium III SpeedStep processors and high-contrast TFT screens. The review machine, a model TT1L7UK, is an 800Mhz unit with 128Mb of RAM, a 14.1in 1024 x 768 TFT screen, a 20Gb hard disk and an eight-speed DVD-ROM drive.

Other features include an onboard 56K modem, 10/100 Ethernet, S-Video out, an infra-red port, headphone, microphone and line-in jacks, alongside the usual complement of one serial, parallel, USB, PS/2 and SVGA ports.

Finally, there's a connector on the underside for an optional docking station or port replicator.

All this in a machine that's 33.1mm thick, weighs 2.1kg, offers a reported 3.7 hours battery life and has a titanium composite case. It's an excellent notebook PC, and we haven't got to its most unusual feature yet - the range of operating system options that IBM offers. Alongside Windows 98 and 2000, you can also choose Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4.

Caldera is a good choice for a corporate machine: it's a clean, graphical distribution that boots straight into the KDE desktop and sports graphical configuration tools and a Novell NetWare client. It's looking a little dated these days, with KDE 1.1.2, XFree86 3.3.6 and kernel 2.2.14, but it's perfectly functional.

The ThinkPad comes with no other operating system installed and boots straight into the KDE log-in manager. A set of recovery discs and install media are supplied.

The keyboard is excellent, with widely spaced, full-sized keys, a proper inverted-T cursor group and no redundant Windows keys. Only the function and cursor keys are less than full size. There are no internet keys but instead the machine has special volume control buttons and a 'ThinkPad' key that should summon the online documentation, but doesn't work under Linux.

A Trackpoint controls the mouse pointer, together with three selector buttons. The third scroll button is correctly configured and works properly in KDE and StarOffice, version 5.2 of which is preinstalled.

Other tweaks to the default Caldera installation include power management, with a battery meter in the status bar, and the addition of the alternative Helix Gnome desktop; you can choose which to use at login. The internal modem is also preconfigured.

The DVD-ROM drive is removable and can be replaced with the bundled internal floppy drive, but there's no cable or housing to allow both to be used at once. Aside from the Caldera manual, the IBM documentation refers solely to Windows and doesn't specify important details such as whether the DVD and floppy drives are hot-swappable.

Beauty is more than skin deep, though, and deeper inspection reveals some curious quirks to the installation. Manufacturers are familiar with installing Windows now and seldom get it badly wrong: it's normal to expect that all the relevant device drivers should be installed, the disk partitioned reasonably and so on. Linux, however, is a whole different ballgame.

Some issues become apparent quickly. The machine has a UK keyboard, but the layout is set to US, meaning that the backslash/pipe key didn't work - unfortunate, as the pipe symbol is important when using Linux's command line.

The machine's BIOS requires a FAT partition for suspend-to-disk functionality, and a 512Mb one was provided, helpfully labelled 'HIBERNATE'. However, we aren't sure what the empty 10Gb FAT32 partition at the end of the disk is for, and between these two, only 8Gb of the 20Gb drive was available for Linux use. A configuration problem meant that neither of the FAT partitions could be mounted or accessed from Linux and, more importantly, neither could the DVD-ROM.

We also found that the network wasn't configured, and after a reboot, the sound system stopped responding, too. This may be due to the plug-and-play BIOS reconfiguring the device, but we couldn't find a way to disable plug-and-play operation, though we found that as shipped the serial and infra-red ports were disabled.

None of these are critical failings, but they are irritating, and without additional software the easiest way to fix them would be to wipe and reinstall - which is precisely what the typical Linux user would probably want to do anyway. It's nonetheless disappointing to find such oversights.

Despite less-than-optimal software configuration, the ThinkPad T21 is an impressive and desirable machine, and its restrained matt-black design conveys better executive credibility than many more garish competitors.

However, prospective purchasers should be ready to wipe and reinstall it to their own requirements - standard policy in many companies anyway, but a tedious chore and one that requires Linux expertise.

ContactIBM 0870 010 2512; www.ibm.com/uk