So it seems that Lenovo has decided to join in on this battery recall fad. It turns out that the main battery in my X60s is one of the explosive Sony variety (the extended life battery isn’t though). I rang them up to organise the replacement, which will be arriving in 5 weeks.
Even though he hasn’t asked for it yet, I sent the details to Richard Hughes. It looks like the battery model numbers are exposed through HAL, so gnome-power-manager should be able to detect the bad batteries.
If you have an affected Thinkpad, check your batteries.
Thank you for this “news”. I just checked and my x60s isn’t affected by the problem, based on the serial number of its main battery.
I’ll point that out to some friends around here that own a Thinkpad.