Initial experiences with the Thinkpad X220 on Debian

I bought a Thinkpad X220, the latest Thinkpad X series offered by Lenovo.

I'm a Linux user, and I've learnt the hard way not to buy brand new laptops on the market that I plan to run Linux on, as it's usually nothing but trouble.

This time things were *pretty* straightforward. Everything worked, with a few exceptions:

Ethernet

I wasn't able to install Debian Squeeze (stable at time of writing) because the ethernet card wasn't recognised. If you are more committed than I am, maybe you can load the required driver somehow (I think it needed a newer version of e1000e). Even selecting the e1000e in the list during the installer didn't work.

I ended up installing Debian Wheezy (testing, from the debian-installer netinstall iso). Worked like a charm.

Wireless

Wireless (Realtek RTL8188CE) was not detected during install. To enable the card at all, I needed to add non-free to my apt sources.list and install firmware-realtek.

However, I soon noticed that when on battery power, if I sat in my lounge room (just down the passage from where the wireless router is), the signal would drop. If I moved two or three metres closer to the wireless router down the hall, it picked up again. This was a problem for me, especially since my previous laptop (Asus UL30VT) worked from this distance no problem with that router.

I ended up upgrading the wireless firmware, following this guide. Note the important message in there re: differing versions for new vs old kernels: the driver for the newer kernels (2.6.35 and later) is buggy and *will* crash your system! Despite being on 2.6.38 due to Debian Testing, I installed the version for 2.6.34 and earlier, and it worked just fine and fixed my signal range issue.

I probably should've purchased the Intel Centrino wireless card when putting in my order, as I've since discovered the Realtek has a poor reputation. We'll see how it goes after that driver upgrade.

Volume keys

The X220 has special volume up/down/mute keys that are not standard 'Function' keys on the keyboard. These signal events according to acpi_listen, but I could not for the life of me work out how to trigger the proper events ( the ones set by acpi already for thinkpad, simply don't work ).

I ended up solving it a nastier way: I use Awesome WM as my window manager, and it accepts keybindings. I set them in my awesome's rc.lua likeso:

    awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioLowerVolume", function () awful.util.spawn("amixer -q sset Master 2dB-") end),
    awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioRaiseVolume", function () awful.util.spawn("amixer -q sset Master 2dB+") end),
    awful.key({ }, "XF86AudioMute", function () awful.util.spawn("amixer -q sset Master toggle") end),

If you were using Gnome, you could do it with Gnome's keybinding config. I believe Ubuntu 11.04 'fix' it in this way.

TODO

I have not yet tested suspend/hibernate etc. Edit: suspend Just Works once you install laptop-mode-tools

The fan seems to spin up/down too often. Not sure why yet, or if thinkfan will help.

The function key to disable the trackpad does not work (but it worked in a test of Ubuntu 11.04, so I need to work out what they did to do that. It may have been a Gnome keybinding, which is not that useful for me). Edit: added this line to .xinitrc:

xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 1

Other stuff that is good

I bought the 9-cell battery and the battery life was much better than I expected: It reported between 11.5 and 12 hours initially. I probably got about 10 hours or more out of it in the end, after applying some my performance hacks to /etc/rc.local (see earlier blog post for the UL30VT)

Other function keys, like the one that activates the reading light above the webcam, works!

The webcam works and the camera is not flipped upside down like it was on my UL30VT :)

Screen brightness function keys Just Worked.