Half a year ago I started working for a new company and they provided me with a Lenovo SL 500. I started using Ubuntu a year ago, so I was eager to try it out on my new laptop. I wanted to keep the pre-installed Windows intact, so I went the wubi way (http://wubi-installer.org/).
After installing most things seem to work fine. Except for a few things. The extra keys, the birghtness and wifi where working non optimal. So i started my search on the internet and found solutions to all of my problems!
Setting the brightness
Ok. So setting the brightness was not easy. It requires a installation of extra drivers, and of the 2.6.30 kernel.
Installation of the new kernel (and new nVidia drivers)
http://law-and-tech.blogspot.com/2009/06/thinkpad-sl500-and-linux.html
Installation of the SL500 acpi driver
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7483027&postcount=4
Installation of the Wifi firmware
Well. I’m not sure if it really fixes the drop-outs of the connections, but there is no more error in the kernel.log
http://intellinuxwireless.org/?n=downloads
Look fot the 5100 agn. Unzip the zip and copy the .ucode file to the /lib/firmware/<your_kernel>
