Got it to work after a few hours of labor.  No changes necessary
within configure-thinkpad!  Thanks so much for your hard work.

As you probably know, SuSE 10 has configure-thinkpad in the
Applications menu, but it doesn't work.  It complains that
/dev/thinkpad doesn't exist and bails.

What I had to do to get it to work:

1. edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to add acpi=off

 title SUSE LINUX 10.0
     root (hd0,4)
     kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 vga=0x314 selinux=0
resume=/dev/hda6  splash=silent showopts acpi=off
     initrd /boot/initrd

2. changed the udev rule you have for SuSE users slightly in
/etc/udev/rules.d/00-thinkpad.rules

 KERNEL="thinkpad", NAME="thinkpad/%k", MODE="0666",
OPTIONS="ignore_remove"

3. created a blank /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad file

4. created /etc/init.d/boot.thinkpad_acpi which basically calls
modprobe

5. ran insserv boot.thinkpad_acpi which created the run level
symlinks and dependancy files


All have to be done as root.

Step 1 is specifically for GrUB.  Alternatively (and better) it can
probably be done by removing the default ACPI stuff from the run
levels.
Steps 2 and 3 may not be necessary.
Step 4 has extra stuff specific for SuSE.
Step 5 is specific to SuSE I think.  All the other steps are portable
to any distribution.


Now my T42 suspends when I close the lid, and awakens when I pop it
back open!  The other ACPI stuff that worked before (LCD brightness,
volume, keyboard light) still work as well.