San Francisco (CA) - Lenovo continues to transform IBM’s former PC division and adjust the characteristics that determine the look and feel of the computers. After adopting AMD processors in certain models, Lenovo now also offers a prestigeous Thinkpad notebook time with a pre-installed Linux operating system.

Linux and Thinkpad notebooks always appeared to have a love affair, at least in numerous user communities, but IBM never actually offered such a system. So far, the installation and configuration required substantial effort and research on sites such as ThinkWiki to get a stable system up and running. But if Linux is what you need on your Thinkpad, then things have gotten a lot easier today.

Lenovo today announced at the Linux World conference that it will be offering a version of its flagship Thinkpad model T60p. The notebook comes typically with Windows XP, but is now available with Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 software as well. Lenovo hopes that especially people involved in engineering and applications will find a Penguin-powered mobile computer attractive enough to shell out some extra dollars.

Thinkpad T60p

And the Linux T60p doesn’t come cheap. While the regular T60p starts at about $1920, the Linux version, which is described by Lenovo as a workstation, will cost at least $3100 as a 14" model and $3200 as a 15" system.

According to Lenovo’s website, the Linux 14" T60p comes with a Core Duo T2700 (2.33 GHz) processor, 1 GB of memory, a 100 GB hard drive a 256 MB ATI FireGL V5200 graphics chip, a DVD burner, 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi, a fingerprint reader and a 9-cell Lithium Ion battery. A similarly equipped Windows T60p is offered by Lenovo for about $2360, which makes the Linux option a rather pricey choice.