Linux on the X220

I just got the Ubuntu 11.04 X64 Live CD going via UNetBootin. Will start an install soon.

Let me know if there's anything specific you'd like me to test.

 

Battery life

[Phoronix] Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted

 

If you can test how the fan and battery holds up in ubuntu it would be helpful. Also maybe the special media buttons?

 

You're probably going to end up getting tp_smapi. Let us know about all the troubleshoots you have with it.

 

I tried the Live versions of Fedora 15 beta RC2, Mandriva 2011.0 beta 2, and Mageia beta 2. They all boot up fine.

Have some Mobile Broadband issues (doesn't work) with Fedora and Mageia atm. Using a Sierra Wireless 890 ExpressCard.

Intel 6205 WiFi works out of the box with Fedora and Mageia. Mandriva's Live DVD does not come with the Intel WiFi driver but it can be downloaded and installed from the non-free repository.

 

Why would I need it?

 

Installed, and currently copying over a bunch of files from my home directory. So far most things are good. Only issue I've seen is that the trackpad driver is not multitouch friendly (which could be rough for this notebook, as it has integrated buttons). But I use the trackpoint, so that's not critical to me.

 

Thanks so much akavile.
Im ordering the x220t, so if your ok with it I will add my experiences in here.
Lenovo should be commended for making linux friendly computers and having such a large number of linux compatible devices compatible.

As I use Linux solely this was a key decision in my computer choice so this habbit of linux compatibility does make financial sense. Keep up the great job lenovo.

 

Sure, no problem.
I wonder how the tablet support is... there are some additional complications with that.

I'm currently running Youtube videos and it seems to be eating up the battery pretty well... if the estimate is to be believed, there's just 2:50 left. Yet the graphic shows it mostly full, and it's been running for 2.5 hours now.

 

It's useful for advanced battery management, particularly if you want to adjust the charging start/stop thresholds.

I don't have an x220 (yet), but my experience from t61 and x201 is that they are not multitouch-enabled out of the box, but can be made to be. If you are running xorg-server 1.9 or newer, creating an /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-touchpad.conf file with the following contents should enable two-finger scrolling and one-finger tapping:

Code:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "My touchpad"

        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"

        Driver "synaptics"

        Option "SHMConfig" "on"
        Option "VertEdgeScroll" "off"
        Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on"
        Option "TapButton1" "1"
EndSection

 

Just ran into a black screen bug -- sound is playing from the Youtube video, and the cursor is changing to a glove when running over links... yet the screen is otherwise black. Don't know a way out except to reboot.

 

Was this youtube fullscreen by any chance? The is a known bug when closing fullscreen flash if compositing is enabled.

 

Nope, it was definitely not full screen.

 

Today's battery status: 23% remaining after 4 hours 40 minutes. The computer is estimating 1:10 remaining with a Youtube video playing.

Usage has been anything but typical: much of the time it's sat idle, at which time it was naturally sipping battery life. So I started running some Youtube videos, which had the CPU running at a constant 25~30%. That really started draining the battery at a dramatically faster rate.

I estimate it would get around 3.5 - 4 hours if running Youtube videos the whole time, and 6-8 for typical usage.

I may try a more realistic test tomorrow. But it's hard to measure start to finish as my usage is very sporadic.

 

would anybody know if a uefi dual boot of ubuntu and win 7 be possible on the x220? from my understanding, a single boot of uefi win 7 is possible but i'm not sure of dual boot...

 

It should work. Just boot into a UEFI-enabled boot manager (legacy grub with efi patches, grub2, or similar). Though I ran into some troubles UEFI booting Fedora 15, perhaps due to some redhat kernel patches. Still investigating...

If you have two drives, you can just format one as GPT and one as MBR and put grub (or your favourite bootloader) on both. Then you can always Legacy BIOS boot if there is a UEFI problem. And after you booted the legacy grub from MBR, you can have it boot anything off GPT disks if necessary.

 

Did you get it to boot from USB? I can't seem to get it working. Might be my USB drive.

 

Yep, worked without a hitch. I think it's F12 to get a boot menu at startup.

 

I haven't found a good option to tame the fan in Linux unfortunately. I tried the tp-fancontrol script from ThinkWiki ( How to control fan speed - ThinkWiki, but that exits immediately after I launch it.

The fan is pegged at 3500 RPM, with the CPU only at about 40 degrees.

 

Just ran into another bug: after waking from sleep, the battery meter shows red, as if there is no power left. However, it does report over 6 hours remaining.

 

You didn't modprobe thinkpad_acpi as in the instructions.

 

Oh, but I did.
I'm able to control the fan by echoing to /proc/acpi/ibm/fan.

 

What does

Code:

cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal

show?

 

No such file or directory.

 

You've got /proc/acpi/ibm/fan, but not /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal? Sorry, I give up. I've never seen that before. Perhaps contacting the authors of the thinkpad_acpi module would be in order...

 

Just installed Natty on my X220.

thinkpad_acpi can't read thermal info from X220 but for some reason, ubuntu can read the temp straight out of the system. So fan control script that relies on thermal reading from thinkpad_acpi probably won't work.

I'm trying to figure out how to lower fan noise. It's pretty annoying.
Touchpad/Trackpoint combo doest to work well together. I would probably disable touchpad soon. Trackpoint has stronger resistance comparing to my X200. It kinda hurt my finger moving mouse around.


On other note, I can't seem to get the LCD to sleep when idle. Right now, it will just blank out the screen and that's it. Ubuntu 10.04 properly sleep LCD on X200.

 

Yeah, thermal info can be read from multiple places in /sys, e.g.:

Code:

$ cd /sys && cat devices/platform/coretemp.0/temp1_input devices/platform/coretemp.2/temp1_input devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp devices/platform/thinkpad_hwmon/temp*

According to an earlier post of akavlie, at least /proc/acpi/ibm/fan is available and works, so putting together a simple script to lower the fan speed when idle should be possible...

Is it the same if you force the immediate power saving mode?

Code:

$ xset dpms force off

Anyway, it looks like there are multiple issues with this model right now, and not just under Linux. I'm planning to order one for work, but probably not for another several months. I can only hope that by then most of the problems will be solved, thanks to the pain of early adopters like you guys.

 

OK.. I think I figure out how to run thinkpad fan control on X220.

** Follow these steps at your own risk. Incorrect settings could shorten your system's life or kill it. **

- Install thinkfan , lm-sensors
- As root, edit "/etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf" and add the following line

- Reboot
- As root, edit "/etc/thinkfan.conf" and add the following line

- You can also adjust your temp/fan speed threshold to your preference. Read thinkfan man page carefully.
- As root, run "thinkfan -n" and see if fan speed changes the way you want.

 

Yes, I had to configure thinkfan to look for thermal reading elsewhere. Never done that before.

No, that command actually turn off the LCD panel. Looks like I'll have to run some test tomorrow.

Using Windows 7 on X220 is even more painful. No matter how fast your CPU, all the bloatware can make sure that every bit of memory and CPU cycle will be used. I wiped the entire HDD as soon as I burned recovery DVDs.

From just a few hours with Natty/X220, my only complaint is that touchpad is rather useless. Prone to accidental touch/click. Mechanical button is not very well designed. Better off disabled.

 

Just curious what bloatware did it come with? Want to keep an eye out for it.

 

I might be a bit too picky here. But I consider ThinkXXX bundled with Windows 7 bloatware. (I think it's called ThinkVision or something.) In addition to that, due to touchpad mishap, I accidentally install Symantec "Internet Security" suite which slowed the system down as well. --- If compared with typical Dell / Toshiba / Fujitsu laptops, X220 is almost bloatware-free.

Anything required to operate a device/peripheral other than its driver is a bloatware in my book.

 

Cool, that works for me.
The wiki page mentions installing the thinkfan package, but not running thinkfan as a process/service. I was trying to run tp-fancontrol, which still does not work. But thinkfan seems to work perfectly.

 

Regarding the touchpad:

Don't mess with xorg.conf. If you created the file, remove it. Install gpointing-device-settings and use that to configure the touchpad.

 

A few notes from my experiences so far: (I started with KUbuntu, and am trying different distros for the moment. End plan is FreeBSD, but I'm waiting on RAM and an mSATA drive before I start that install.)

KDE is not the best choice for a Thinkpad. 'gpointing-device-settings' is a Gnome program, and doesn't appear to have full functionality (at least...) under KDE. Also, KDE's password management isn't very centralized, and only some of it supports PAM, and therefore the fingerprint reader. KUbuntu 10 also appears to be missing some display drivers; screen animations were slow and jerky. (KUbuntu 11 doesn't have this issue.)

The Ubuntu USB maker appears to only work for Ubuntu OS's. (Or possibly, only with CD ISOs, not DVD.) Unetbootin is a different program, and works just fine.

The Ubuntu USB maker creates USB's that are recognized by UEFI, but cannot boot from UEFI. If you leave your BIOS in the default Legacy/UEFI mode, this is not a problem. If you reverse that order, it is.

 

akavlie, since there isn't much attention on Linux/x220 I thought I might share my experience here instead of creating a new thread. hope it's ok with ya.

--

Even though battery life I got from Ubuntu/X220 is nowhere near those who use stock Windows 7 installation, it's an improvement over my X200.

I was able to get about 4.5 hours under following situation :
- X220 Core i7 + 6-cell battery / 8GB Ram / 250GB
- Ubuntu 11.04 with Thinkfan. (Conservative mode) Temp was somewhere between 47-50C
- Wi-Fi on all the time. No WWAN/Bluetooth module installed.
- One VPN tunnel, one RDP session, one Firefox instance, one Thunderbird instance and several terminals.
- Screen dimmed to about 60-70% on a scale shown on Ubuntu.
- Did not browse Flash-based website. Did not use audio.
- Power saving option :: Dim LCD automatically when idle, no HDD spindown, no auto hibernate/sleep/shutdown. Used the "blank" screen saver.
** 4.5 hours = right when battery applet turned red. it estimated about 30 minutes of running time left.

I suppose if I watch YouTube or do some regular heavy lifting like 2-3 VMs running and a couple of large spreadsheets, battery life wouldn't be as good. However, under the same condition on X200 with 9-cell (Ubuntu 10.10), I would be lucky to get 3.5 hours out of it.

Additional comment :
- ThinkLight is way way brighter than X200, which is nice.
- Audio controls work, except mic. mute button.
- Video quality via Skype seem rather poor comparing to iPad 2 front camera.
- Cannot turn off Wi-Fi using indicator applet. Only hard switch can turn it off.
- IPS screen is really nice.
- Keyboard is much better than X200
- Touchpad sucks big time. I had to disable it.
- I'm glad I stuck with X200 last year. While not perfect, X220 is a major improvement over X200/201.

 

There is another thread and some posts saying that 11.04 ubuntu natty has as much as 25% greater power consumption than prior versions.

My question for the experts is that is ubuntu going to have identical power consumption to windows eventually? Did the last version of Ubuntu (10.10) end up having identical to Windows power consumption? With the right tweaks, can one expect to have Ubuntu last as long as Windows while on battery? Thanks

 

On some hardware. I don't think anybody has confirmed it on Sandy Bridge thinkpads. In any case it'll be fixed soon enough.

Yes. Run powertop.

 

Has anyone tried running 64bit ubuntu?

 

No, but there's no reason it shouldn't work identically.

 

First, you should really understand that your question is completely dependent on hardware. The answer changes greatly depending on which machine you are asking about. In the context of this thread, I assume you mean the x220, but the question "Did the Ubuntu 10.10 have identical power consumption?" is not well-formed.

As someone above said, if your question is "will it eventually?" then the answer is yes. If your question is "will it quickly?" then the answer is most likely no. The X220 uses a new mobile platform. It takes a while for all of the power saving features of new hardware to be well-supported in the Linux kernel.

Battery life shouldn't be bad in Linux, but it is usually not equivalent to Windows. Although I have no machine with Windows, this is my general understanding, due to the fact that the hardware developers write their drivers for Windows, while Linux relies on open source community-developed drivers (though Intel has a history of writing drivers for Linux, as well as a few other companies). Furthermore, Lenovo makes little tweaks here and there which save power.

If all you care about is battery life, then use Windows (if you can stand it, which it sounds like you can). If you want a more functional, free (open) operating system, use Linux. I personally cannot stand Ubuntu or Windows, because I am a control freak over my OS (to the point that I care about not having unnecessary/unwanted libraries).

Unlike Windows, you are always free to simply try GNU/Linux. I find it to be better for every task I perform daily (and the only reason Windows would be just as usable is because the GNU/Linux programs I prefer were open source and ported to Windows or perhaps run in Cygwin).

Thanks,
Ryan

 

I agree with much of what "measure" wrote above.

As to "will it eventually?", this is more of a wishful thinking than anything else. A specific example: I have an older Thinkpad, an x201, bought a year ago. When I bought it, Windows 7 would idle at 6.5-7W, Linux at 10-11W. What's the situation now, a year later? Linux idles at 11-12W. So at least for me, it has actually gotten worse, not better. From what I hear, this is a general problem that affects, e.g., the new releases of Ubuntu or Fedora.

The problem with open source is that people work on what they want, and not necessarily on what needs work. So if power management is not a cool topic, no progress will be made. I would speculate that right now few serious Linux developers care about power management in laptops.

I wish it was that simple. I run powertop. I have no CPU hogs running, I have fewer than 100 wakeups per second, and powertop has no recommendations as to what else I could tweak. Powertop is a useful tool to identify some problems with your system, no doubt about it, but don't fool yourself into thinking that it will get your power consumption to the level of Windows. That will take work in the drivers of the hardware devices.

 

Further notes: (Yes, I'm continuing to install other OS choices on this laptop, trying them for a few minutes, than blowing them away. )

OpenSUSE recognizes the fingerprint reader out of the box, and has the best default touchpad settings I found yet. However, that fingerprint recognition is odd: You enable it in one place, then go in to edit the user you want to use it with, and it's a plugin. (You have to 'Edit' the user, then switch tabs.) It recognizes one finger per user. Note that many of the password prompts you will see are root password prompts, and that's a different user. (That doesn't show up in the default list.) Also, it doesn't really prompt you for a fingerprint. The standard password prompt will come up, and you have to swipe, then hit enter. (And often, repeat.)

Also, learned from the above: Turning off the 'tap on the touchpad' makes it several hundred percent less annoying.

Oh: Getting a bootable USB for OpenSUSE isn't easy if you aren't running OpenSUSE. (Or, I suppose, Windows, as they have directions for that as well.) Unetbootin doesn't work, and OpenSUSE's instructions use software I haven't seen on any other Linux distro.

Any suggestions for other distros I should try?

 

How about Linux Mint or Debian?

 

Sorry I didn't mention Mint directly: I tried several variants of it already. (XFce, Gnome, KDE, I think.) No special notes on it over Ubuntu; it works much the same, support-wise.

It does bring to mind one thing though: LiveCD images aren't quite accurate on the X220. They tend to assume a limited list of standard resolutions, and the X220's is not on that list, so things will appear distorted. (I tried a couple before installing them.)

 

Quick note on Debian:

Do NOT use the network installer image.

It failed to recognize either interface on the X220 (to be fair, it notified me of this, asking for driver disks), and then merrily went on it's way to format the hard drive. Afterwards it failed, due to being unable to connect to a repository. Leaving me with a freshly formatted, blank, hard drive.

(In the interest of hardware lists: I have upgraded WiFi. I have the Ultimate-N 6300 card.)

I'm re-installing OpenSUSE, and then I'll download a full installer and retry.

(If I'd been thinking, I might have thought to stop when it failed to set up the network. But the installer didn't seem to think this was a fatal error, and I thought it might be able to install the base system without.)

 

Ok, fuller notes on Debian:

I wasn't able to get the live CD image to work via USB. (Didn't try extremely hard, but did try a couple of ways. Couldn't find any docs specifically on that image, which is distributed in a different format than the rest of their images.) I wasn't sure if the DVD images would fit on my USB drive, so I went with the CD. I do like their method of making a bootable USB stick from their ISOs: 'cat' the ISO to the drive's device.

Again, no networking. The WiFi card might have been recognized, but I'm not sure, and I didn't see any way to configure it graphically.

That 'can't configure it graphically' in fact kinda sums up the entire Debian system: I got a very basic Gnome desktop, and no way to do much of any configuration graphically. I get the feeling from their website that if you have the patience to build the system by hand at the command line, you should be able to get it just about any way you like, but...

Notables: Again, the ethernet card was not recognized. No package-manager, the screen didn't detect the correct resolution, and the trackpad came up as a generic mouse. (Not even as a touchpad.)

I didn't try to get the fingerprint reader working, nor did I do much beyond poke around.

Not recommended for anyone who doesn't want to tinker.

I'll see if I can get to Fedora tomorrow night.

 

mil2: You are right, my answer was perhaps more black-and-white than I meant for it to be. An example where Linux does (most likely) match windows is my x40. It idles at 4-7W, which is unreal! My T410 idles at 11-15W, which is not great. What you say is true; but this is also the beauty of the Linux. If you really want something done the documentation is out there for you to get it done (you just have to have a lot of time).

To keep this a bit on topic, what is likely an issue here is that Intel is making new mobile platforms more and more frequently. The platform of your X201 and my T410 only stuck around for a year. There's not much motivation to put a lot of time into such a platform. The platform for the X220 will likely be the same, and might suffer from the same problem.

DStaal: What exactly do you want out of a distribution that you aren't getting out of Ubuntu, since you seem to not want to deal with the command line? All of the distributions still basically use the same desktop environments: Gnome, KDE of Xfce. The only differences will be the themes applied by default and perhaps the graphical tools provided to configure the system. Just for the record, Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian.

Furthermore, this discussion of these distributions is a bit out of place here I think. I really suggest you go to the Linux form at Linux Compatibility and Software. As far as the wireless being a problem, this is strange. Intel wifi is well-supported by Linux. I am fairly sure this only happened because you ignored the instructions/weren't willing to use the command line.

 

Intels own LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux would help anybody looking to minimize power consumption of their laptop with Linux.

 

I think you misunderstand me slightly. I'm not planning on running any linux distribution on my X220 long-term. This is a way for me to play with my new toy while I'm waiting for parts to arrive. Once they arrive, I'll be installing FreeBSD. (I don't want to install it ahead of time because of the config I'm planning. I'd have to reinstall anyway.)

So my main goal here is just to try different linux distributions, and see how they differ. For running them, I'll agree once you've got things set up they should all be similar. I was just trying to see how easy/hard it is to configure them to support this laptop in particular. (As a way to gauge how their configuration tools work, and how their package selection/installers work.) For that there are significant differences.

I thought since I was doing this, I might as well post some of my notes here. I'm trying to specifically discuss only things that are relevant to this hardware in particular, and that appear to differ significantly. Which has been the Trackpad and fingerprint reader.

I know Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. And, for this, Mint and Ubuntu were essentially the same. Debian, as I mentioned, wasn't. I only really went into the detail I did on Debian because it had been requested specifically, and because it differed so radically from the experience of all the other installs.

For the wireless (and wired) ethernet being a problem: It was only on Debian, and it's only because their installer doesn't include the drivers. If you go to the Debian site, finding which driver package you need is fairly easy. It's just hard to get without having the drivers already. (I did read and follow the instructions.)

I'm not completely command-line adverse, but since I'm not planning to stick with any of these distros I didn't see the need to spend the time to learn a new command-line package system. (Which I'm not going to use again in the near future.) (I should note that my planned FreeBSD install will be heavily dependent on command line, as I'll be using some -CURRENT patches that the installer doesn't know about yet.)

I hadn't really looked around beyond the Lenovo section of this website, so I wasn't aware of the other section. If my experiences are wanted here, I can take a look over there. (Though I'm mostly just keeping an eye out for issues that people are noting on the X220 since it's new.)

 

DStaal: You are right, I did severely misjudge your intentions. Perhaps I have not read far enough into your posts, but you were coming off as perhaps the most fickle distribution hopper in history. I apologize, I reread my comments and they seemed a bit rude; It was late and I was a bit tired.

Anyway, hopefully people newer to Linux get something out of your work. I've had fleeting interest in BSD, but would be curious to hear how that goes. It is my understanding that BSD does not usually support new hardware (which is I guess why you will be applying copious amounts of patches).

Thanks (and sorry again),
Ryan