I needed to buy a laptop for the moment. Simple requirements..

  1. Cheep
  2. Supported by Linux
  3. Lightish

The Thinkpad Edge 13" meets all the requirements. Theres a few thins I had to do make everything work.

  1. make.conf flags. I've kept it simple. CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -march=native" The version of GCC I am using supports all of the i3's  quirks and features. You can check to see if  "native" will support your cpu by using the following two commands :
# cc -march=native -E -v - </dev/null 2>&1 | grep cc1
# echo | gcc -dM -E - -march=native
  1. Internal Sound card to get jack sence and for it to disable the internal mic and speaker when the jack was used, edit the following file :
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf

At the end of the file add the following :

options snd-hda-intel model="olpc-xo-1_5" enable_msi=1

By using alsa-info we can find out we have a conexant pebble audio chip. Conexant CX20582 (Pebble) From that we can check out:-

/usr/src/linux/sound/pci/hda/patch_conexant.c

To see all the possible modes for the 5066 chip, there is a few but the one that worked for me was "olpc-xo-1_5" In addition to make jacksense work we can look at :

# modinfo snd_hda_intel

This will tell us we can use msi=1 to enable the jack sense message bus.

  1. Much to my annoyance the USB chipset on this machine is the Intel 3400 series that have a bug related to there rate liming hub. What this means is that for me my Edirol UA-25ex can not work in full duplex mode with USB2..... You also must have the following two options on in your kernel :
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_ROOT_HUB_TT=y
CONFIG_USB_EHCI_TT_NEWSCHED=y

This will help with some of the nastiness of the usb chipset. I still needed to turn off "Advance" mode and swap to 41000khz. Annoying but its much better then nothing.. thanks Intel...

  1. Intel video card. This one is pretty easy, once you understand how KMS is different. Ensure your kernel has NO other VGA/VESA drivers apart from the below :
CONFIG_DRM=y
CONFIG_AGP=y
CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=y
CONFIG_DRM_I915=y
CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS=y

With the above settings on boot your console will switch to native resolution. Ensure Xorg is using the "xf86-video-intel" driver and your done. No need for any addition tools, userspace mods or kernel boot options!

The card reader,wifi and ethernet work fine. I am unable to test the eSATA, HDMI and vga port.