God damned ThinkPad 390…
I’ve got a beast like that
I had to repair the left swing because it was borken. After a couple of hours of drilling, screwing, … I finished. I made some extra metallic holders and armoured the swing in a way that it is now kinda indistructive.
After the “dirty” work I said: “Well I like Linux and I don’t use any other OS for now, so let’s install my preferred distro (Slackware).”
It took some time and it installed without any problems. Then guess what!?! ACPI, USB and many other thing haven’t worked. So I said: “Cool! Let’s recompile the kernel!” and then… more and more things stopped to work, so I said: “Let’s install something that should work from out of the box! Let’s install Ubuntu!”.
Ubuntu worked for the time of the installation, the configuration (USB did not work there too) until I took my laptoop to sleep. Ubuntu never woke up again since then, so I said: “God dammit Foobuntu. Let’s use something that a least stands on it’s feet.” And there was Slackware again. Installed, configured, recompiled the kernel, ….. but again on the 2.6.x the USB doesn’t work. Guess why!?!? Nobody knows! 
I’ll write more about configuring my laptop here because I see that there’s not so much talking about things that don’t work on this model of the ThinkPad.