Linux on a laptop ... step 2?

[wdr at theworld.com (William Ricker)]

Silly me, i thought loading Ubuntu on a used IBM ThinkPad T23 would be
easy. Well it mostly works, but I got a wakeup call when it overheated.

Googling, I found setting BIOS "AC: Max Performance" is a bad idea (ok,
fix that!  Didn't mean to be overclocking ;-)
And That APM is old news, but that ACPI support in Linux is still
do-it-yourself.  And Ubuntu being bleeding edge, installed APCI but
generic. (At least Lid suspend works.)

Looks like I need to add ibm-apci kernel module support at the very
least. 

When I boot there are several other "mod probe" suggestsions that go
scrolling by.   I guess they're not kernel messages per se since they
aren't logged in 'dmesg's ring buffer.  Can I retrieve those mod-probe
warnings later from some log file?

Any other warnings?

Bill