I have a T61, and it seems to be working fine with Debian... Here's
the output of dmesg and lsmod:

erikm at hemingway:~$ dmesg | grep acpi
[148892.948904] thinkpad_acpi: ACPI backlight control delay disabled
[1045284.497027] thinkpad_acpi: ACPI backlight control delay disabled
[1269770.057042] thinkpad_acpi: ACPI backlight control delay disabled


erikm at hemingway:~$ lsmod | grep acpi
acpi_cpufreq           12807  1
mperf                  12421  1 acpi_cpufreq
thinkpad_acpi          47494  0
rfkill                 18516  5 thinkpad_acpi,bluetooth,cfg80211
snd                    38551  13
snd_hda_codec_analog,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,thinkpad_acpi,snd_seq,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
nvram                  12897  1 thinkpad_acpi
processor              27389  3 acpi_cpufreq

If you open a terminal and type the following commands:

$ dmesg | grep acpi
$ lsmod | grep acpi

The first command shows bootup messages from the kernel (the grep acpi
filters out lines that don't contain "acpi"). The second command lists
the current loaded modules (aka drivers). What you can see on my
machine is that the thinkpad_acpi module is loaded. You should be able
to run these commands on your machine to see if you already have this
module loaded.

-Erik


On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Olwe Bottorff <galanolwe at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Noob needs to add driver
>
> Hi Olwe,
> What distribution are you using?
>
> -Erik
>
> Sorry! I'm on Ubuntu 11.10-64.
>
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Olwe Bottorff <galanolwe at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I'm a rank amateur at serious kernel stuff, so I'm coming to you folks. My
>> Thinkpad T61 puts off lots of heat. I lift it up and it's VERY hot. I fear
>> for its health. I'm going to reapply thermal grease, but I've found a page
>> that talks about a driver
>> here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Thinkpad-acpi
>>  With this driver installed I can supposedly install software that will
>> control the fan. Can I get some coaching on how to install this driver?
>>
>> Olwe
>> GM,MN
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>



-- 
Erik K. Mitchell
erik.mitchell at gmail.com