Some general things that have held true about all the Thinkpads so far:

You must use a kernel with APM installed. Or suspending won't work. (use the laptop config option on red hat)
You can't suspend with a pcmcia card installed and AC power plugged in. So either unplug the power or eject the card.

You can warm swap the ultra-bay devices if you sleep the machine first.

At least in RH 7.0 you need adjust the hdparams inorder to save the batteries. Otherwise the disk will spin up and down all the time.

If you want to hibernate the machine you need to boot to dos and run ibm's thinkpad config utility. This will format a special partition for hibernating.

The safest way to mess with the thinkpad hardward config is to have a dos partition that you can boot to. Then you can easily run this program. You can enable and disable the IR port, COMM port, Modem port. You can modify the sleep settings. More and more.

There is a linux program you can run to mess with these settings but it doesn't seem to have all the functionality of the offical IBM. I'd hope that IBM will release an offical version of the linux program.

So the most functionl partion setup is:
FAT partition for hibernating. - size of largest memory to be put in machine
Fat partitoin for booting to dos - just enough for dos and IBM thinkpad config utility
Standard linux config. (swap and everthing else)