Lenovo Thinkpad X200 and Kubuntu Karmic Koala

I've got my replacement notebook about 2 weeks ago. It's a Thinkpad X200. Personally I think it's the perfect notebook for a system engineer like me. It's small, it's light, it has sufficient power to run all the necessary application. Since it's a new notebook, I thought why not fit it with a new OS, so I downloaded the (back then) new release of Kubuntu Karmic Koala beta release.

Installation
Since the X200 don't have an optical drive, I had to make a usb bootable disk. To do this I used the ubuntu usb-creator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Live_USB_creator). It took two usb disk for me to succeed. I don't know what's wrong with the first one though. After I got the usb disk, the installation went smoothly. I was able to rearrange my hard drive partitions (the X200 came with a windows Vista that I kept for gaming purpose).

First Boot
Compared to my old system (dual core, 2.5 GB Mem, Jaunty), the system boot really fast, although I can't tell if the improvement is because of Karmic or because of the X200. As promised, no more screen blinking, switching back to your terminal and back X this time, you'll just stay in X from the get go. All of my devices were detected and working normally, except for the internal modem (didn't even bother to try it) and the fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader is different from the other thinkpad's reader and I weren't able to find the right module for it. And after seeing how easy it is to copy someone's fingerprint, I just stopped looking. Suspend to RAM works every time, while I had one failure with the hibernation. Hopefully it'll be fixed when the Karmic is officially released.

Every Day use
After using for about 2 weeks, normally I got about 3.5 to 4 hours of battery. If I really turned it down than I would get about 5 hours of battery. The temperature is quite low for me, I hardly noticed the fan working. Haven't really push it though, hopefully next week I'll be able to push it by running dynamips with 10 or more routers :). For Karmic, it's a beta but it's really nice and stable. I got new updates every day though. I've been using KDE4 since KDE4.2 so nothing new for me there.