T440s under linux

Hey,

I would like to have this thread for experience under linux! There are so many threads which are filled with useless information, so maybe we can gather some linux relevant information here

There seem to be problems with battery recognition?

 

Hey,

I would like to have this thread for experience under linux! There are so many threads which are filled with useless information, so maybe we can gather some linux relevant information here

Hot topics are Optimus with Linux 3.12 and High DPI screen scaling.

 

Great idea! I just got mine today, waiting to get my SSD and then I'll be installing Ubuntu 13.10 most likely tonight or tomorrow. I'll be sure to update you guys on my experiences here.

 

I have it working pretty nicely. Battery life appears to be around 4 - 5 hours under medium load (linux + windows VM in virtualBox). I have a 4800 CPU and a crucial SSD. Bumblebee works and it turns off the nvidia card. I don't know how the nVidia card is because I want it off. Dual external monitors with simultaneous built in display works well using integrated Intel graphics. I posted here about configs for ACPI and the trackpoint/clickpad: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1349478

The high DPI screen is still somewhat of an issue for me. I set the xserver_arguments in my slim config to include -dpi 157 which makes some text larger, but some not. For example the menus in google-chrome have large letters, but the Tabs are very small. Perhaps there is something I can configure for that. I spend a lot of time expanding text in the web browser. Even so, it's a very nice screen. Also, I haven't figured out how to get multiple screens to operate at different DPI's so when I connect external displays the text is way too big on those.

I am running kernel 3.11 in Debian sid and as I said above I have no interest in using the nvidia card, so I can't help you out with those.

This seems to be a very nice machine. 16GB of RAM is nice and it's really not very big considering all that it has. I really like the keys, they feel really nice to hit, but I keep hitting Fn when I meant to hit Ctrl.

One other thing, I have the i7 4800 CPU. The machine came with a 135 Watt power supply. I also ordered a 65 Watt power supply which was recommended on the Lenovo website, but the machine won't draw power from the low wattage adapter while it is powered on. It powers the battery when the machine is asleep or off, but not when it's on. I'm not sure if the 90Watt adapter would work or not. There's information about this online relating to an older thinkpad model. Something about hacking the cable or the jack to trick the machine into thinking that it has the higher wattage cable when it doesn't. I imagine this will be an issue as these gain popularity because the high wattage adapters are not widely available.

 

In the BIOS you have a toggle to swap Fn & CTRL. Go under Config, then Keyboard/Mouse.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

nissimk, is this with 100Wh or 56Wh battery? Also, maybe you know the battery life time in Windows?

 

Thanks for the information nissimk .

I have also order a machine with 4800MQ, FullHD screen and 9cell battery.
I will need the dGPU on Windows (which I use for music prodcution) but won't need it for linux (which I use for everything else :-D), thus it's is nice to hear that you can turn it off with Bumblebee. I'm also planning to use some kind of Debian version, but as I am developing for Android I'm afraid I have to use stable to get ia32-libs working.

How is the fan working for you?

 

I have the smaller 6-cell battery. I never ran windows, but comments in another thread report similar battery life, possibly a little better. The fan was a bit of an issue. It is kind of loud if you're in a quiet room. I started by installing some fan control software, but before I enabled it I decided to just try changing the cpu frequency governor. Now I use powersave governor on battery and conservative governor on AC. This keeps the fan from spinning up too frequently even with the default fan control settings. I'm going to try to get used to the keyboard rather than change it in the bios.

Also, I was planning on setting up an android dev environment on here, so hopefully there won't be too many issues. I will report back here after getting it setup.

 

adb is working fine after following the instructions here: Install ADB and Fastboot Android Tools

 

I installed Linux Mint two days ago and have been unable to find a driver for the wireless card (I've got the ThinkPad 2x2 b/g/n card made by RealTek, regretting not getting the Intel versions now). I've tried installing the Windows 7 drivers from Lenovo using ndiswrapper, but it does not work. The stellar documentation says that sometimes, it simply does not work for certain cards. RealTek does not even list the card on their website, let alone have drivers for it. I've tried everything I can think of, but have had no success. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

 

Yeah, for those who have yet to order, go with the Intel wireless, always. Anything else will be way more trouble with drivers.

 

Looking at getting a T440s with ubuntu minimal and had some questions about linux performance. Have people managed to get both batteries working? I read that some people could only use one on linux. How is the trackpad/trackpoint performance? What is the battery life like? Does intel wifi work well? Are there any drivers that are not available, such as camera, mic, speakers, display, etc? Thanks

 

I'm just starting my installation right now, Intel wifi is working perfectly in the installer. Clickpad is mildly annoying right now, or well, I think in Windows when you're using the trackpoint it knows not to interpret motion on the Clickpad as mouse movement, but in Linux it moves the cursor if your finger slides on the Clickpad even if you're also moving with the trackpoint (the two basically fight each other lol). It's not unusable though, you just have to be careful when clicking and I think it's something you can adapt to. But slightly annoying of course. My previous laptop was worse in this regard and that was part of the impetus for me to get a Thinkpad with a trackpoint so it's kind of funny that they managed to mess that up but in the end I adapted to my old laptop and I can adapt to this one.

Oh hey actually, just realized that the top strip above the Clickpad is not touch sensitive so if you keep your fingers there when using the trackpoint it's much better. To be honest I'm not sure why they didn't make that bit a little bigger, I don't see why you would ever want it to move if you were using the trackpoint to move.

Also, both batteries are definitely detected by Ubuntu, I can see the charge state for both of them.

(Ubuntu 13.10)

One last thing, the trackpoint "button" area does not work properly out of the box, as in the middle and right buttons don't work. Two finger scroll works really well (IMO it's smoother than in Windows, but that might just be because Linux is smoother than Windows) and right click works in the bottom right corner. No other gestures seem to work (two/three finger clicks for instance do nothing). I haven't spent any time trying to configure anything special yet of course. I'd say out of the box it's definitely usable if a little non ideal.

 

@iofthestorm - brilliant, can you keep us updated with things like battery life & external monitor support?

 

Has anyone tried installing linux on the 16gb m.2 drive? I'm wondering why lenovo discourages installing the os on this

 

Hows the battery life and dpi scaling in linux? and linux vs windows?

 

The latest version of the TAILS live CD (based on Debian-stable) doesn't work with the Intel AC wireless card. I would suggest that unless you already have an AC network, that you're probably better off getting the Intel N version now and waiting to upgrade to the AC version once you have an AC network.

 

I think support for the 7260 family of wireless cards has only very recently been added to the kernel, perhaps in 3.10. I guess some distros back-port the drivers to older kernels, but generally, you'd do well to try the most recent stable kernel on new laptops. At least the driver's webpage and repository on kernel.org shows a lot of recent activity by Intel:

iwlwifi - Linux Wireless

... I imagine one would want to have those latest additions and bugfixes. I'm happy Intel seems to be making a serious effort to support their own products in Linux.

 

Hi all. I've been running Ubuntu 13.10 on my T440s for a few days now. Here are my observations so far:

* Both batteries are detected. Haven't tried taking out the removable one while running the machine.
* Battery life is impressive coming from a T430s. I haven't run any benchmarks but I think I should be able to eek out 6 hours with my normal use, where I bring down LCD brightness by one step (there are only four steps of brightness)
* The touchpad is difficult to work with using default settings. I'll go into this further and what I've done to improve it in my next post
* There are some minor suspend annoyances. When I close the lid, the laptop suspends reliably, but when I open the lid, about half the time it wakes up for a couple of seconds and then immediately goes back to sleep, whereby I need to hit the power button to wake it up again.
* Also intermittently I find when I wake from suspsend audio does not work. Another suspend cycle or two and it will work again.
* I frequently get crashes reported by WPA supplicant on wake from suspsend, but it seems to restart itself seamlessly so I don't notice it other than getting the crash report dialog (which I've now set to ignore future crashes from WPA supplicant)

Also tested: web camera, SD card reader, Intel wifi - all working

Scott

 

Ok, some more details about the touchpad.

First of all, the synaptics driver does not have palm detection working, so if you're like me and have poor typing form (wrists are really supposed to float above the keyboard), you will frequently be typing away and suddenly find the cursor has jumped to a different section of the text and register a mouse click. This. Drives. Me. Insane.

There are a couple of things you can do to mitigate this. First you'll want to use syndaemon, which will disable the touchpad while you're typing. The GNOME/Cinnamon mouse settings configuration GUI only allows you to turn syndaemon on or off ("disable touchpad while typing"), but not set the delay after you stop typing to re-enable the touchpad. I found I wanted a longer delay, so I un-checked the "disable touchpad by typing" and wrote a small script to run "syndaemon -i 1.2 -d" that I run upon login (Startup Applications). The 1.2 means it keeps the touchpad disabled while typing for 1.2 seconds after you stop typing.

For the most part I rely on the mouse as little as possible, so I wanted to be able to just disable and re-enable the touchpad with a keybinding. So I have another script which toggles the touchpad that I've tied to a keybinding. The synclient command is handy for this - synclient TouchpaddOff=0 / synclient TouchPadOff=1.

I'll throw these scripts up onto GitHub this week as I tweak a few more things.

You'll find that the mouse cursor can be very "jumpy" by which I mean you can move your mouse over a dialog button, lift up and down to click it, and in doing so the curor will move over enough that you end up missing the button (or worse, hitting an unintended button). The synclient command again comes in handy here, as you can increase the "HorizHysteresis" and "VertHysteresis" values to something like 25 or 30 to decrease the "jumpiness" of the cursor. It helps considerably, but I still am not finding the touchpad experience to be especially comfortable.

This is just a quick dump of my thoughs, apologies if the writing isn't especially clear.

Scott

 

Ok, I got mine today .

Installed debian testing via netinstall. After installation I had to install intel-wifi drivers ( https://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi). Then I installed bumblebee and it seemed to work fine, but when I attached any monitor to the docking station with the t440p on it, the screen freezed. I tried to remove bumblebee but aptitude reported an error. I will do a fresh install and check multimonitor without bumblebee, using the free driver. If it doesn't work, I'll install the proprietary driver. So far...

 

I have successfully run with 2 external screens, but not with a docking station. I'm using sid and this has worked with both 3.11-1, 3.11-2 and now I'm running a 3.12.1 kernel I compiled myself. I believe that bbswitch is always set to have the nvidia card turned off.

Does your multi-monitor work without the docking station?

 

My experiences thus far with my T440s, Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon x64

1) Wireless
2) Touchpad
3) Battery
4) Dual monitor

1) Wireless: Like zerot, I mistakenly ordered the Thinkpad 2x2 AKA RealTek 818b wireless card. I tried many different windows adapters using ndiswrapper (Win8/Win7, even drivers for RTL8187b which I was randomly hoping would be similar to 818b). Nothing. I pulled a wireless adapter from my RPi that I wasn't using (EDIMAX EW-7811-Un) and that worked okay out of the box. My internet did drop once while using it but I can't 100% blame it on the drivers. Would be nice to eventually get the built-in network card to work.

2) Touchpad: Like zenlinux, my touchpad experience was annoying to say the least out of the box. I added a startup process "syndaemon -d" which from what I understand turns off the touchpad for 2 seconds while typing. Add -i N with N being a number after it to adjust the amount of time you want it disabled. I also installed touchpad-indicator which conveniently turns off the touchpad when I have a mouse connected (I prefer to use a wireless mouse over touchpad anyway). Touchpad-indicator also has an option to turn off touchpad while typing, but I haven't tried it.

The touchpad itself is extremely jumpy and is nearly unusable. You go to click on something, lift your finger off the touchpad, and now the cursor is 1-2cm away from where you left it. I adjusted my HorizHysteresis/VertHysteresis to 30 per zenlinux's recommendation, but it's still pretty bad.

3) Battery: Like others have said, both batteries show up and seem to be working as expected.

4) Dual-monitor: I've had it connected to a second monitor, no problems there.

 

VGA from the laptop works fine, I don't have a mini-DP cable here, thus I can't test it now (I will do it this weekend).

 

Docking station displays definitely freeze Gnome 3 in debian testing stock, no further driver installed. They unfreeze again when I put of the laptop from the docking station. The only thing that does not freeze is when I put it in having tty open. I cannot change to tty when it has already freezed though. Seems to be complicated :-/

 

Has anyone tried mutliple displays attached to the docking station? I cannot get it working on my t440p

 

Intel HD Graphics
- (Computer's LCD)
- Computer's analog VGA connector
- Computer's DisplayPort connector
- Docking Station's analog VGA connector
- Docking Station's DVI connector(s)
- Docking Station's DisplayPort connector(s)
- Docking Station's HDMI connector
NVIDIA GeForce GT 730M, GeForce GT 720M
- No display is connected to this display adapter.

found here

 

This can be confusing, but it means that the discrete graphics card is not "hard wired" to any particular ports. You can switch between Intel or nVidia.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

Yeah, I understood that, but thanks for the explanation . Actually I'm quite happy as that means that the Intel GPU is responsible for any display.

Under debian testing bumblebee causes problems for me. I get massive errors at shutdown and I also cannot uninstall it properly. But you can use bbswitch (the kernel module which shutdowns the dGPU) without bumblebee.

- load bbswitch at startup:
add a new line
bbswitch
to /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf

- tell bbswitch to turn of dGPU at startup
create a new file in /etc/modprobe.d/bbswitch.conf
switch off nvidia dGPU at start
options bbswitch load_state=0 unload_state=1

- re-activate dGPU at shutdown
Enable NVIDIA card during shutdown

The NVIDIA card may not correctly initialize during boot if the card was powered off when the system was last shutdown. One option is to set TurnCardOffAtExit=false in /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf, however this will enable the card everytime you stop the Bumblebee daemon, even if done manually. To ensure that the NVIDIA card is always powered on during shutdown, add the following systemd service (if using bbswitch):

/etc/systemd/system/nvidia-enable.service

[Unit]
Description=Enable NVIDIA card
DefaultDependencies=no

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'echo ON > /proc/acpi/bbswitch'

[Install]
WantedBy=shutdown.target

Then enable the service by running systemctl enable nvidia-enable.service at the root prompt.

I found this solution at ArchWiki

 

Yeah, the jumpiness when clicking is really annoying. I find that it happens mostly when I'm using the Trackpoint, and less so if I'm using the touchpad. Kind of annoying but I am still figuring out which input device I want to use (first Thinkpad) so I'm very adaptable right now.

I think the Windows driver may be able to detect light pressure on the clickpad, and disable motion in those cases? I haven't played with hysteresis yet, I feel like that should help a lot though. Luckily when I'm using Linux I'm pretty able to navigate without a mouse altogether (yay tiling WM) so it's not a huge problem. But I'm annoyed because the main reason I got a thinkpad was because my old laptop had bad clickpad support under Linux and I hoped the Trackpoint would solve that problem, but for me it's actually worse under Linux than the touchpad (I feel the opposite way in Windows). I'm actually tempted to learn kernel driver development or at least how to hack on it so that I can mess around with the driver, it's really crappy to use honestly.

Are there any programs to configure UltraNav behavior for Linux? I can't find anything recent. In Windows I was able to mitigate some issues with the clickpad by messing with settings at least. Wish I could do that in Linux.

 

Try to find a file "synaptics" under "xorg.conf.d". The touchpad settings are stored there. type man synaptics for explanations about how to configure that file.

 

Others are experiencing problems with displays attached to the docking station as well (german)

 

If you disable the trackpad in BIOS, does it help with this issue?

 

Probably, but I like using the trackpad in some cases so that's not really something I want to do. I'm curious about the programs that disable trackpad when you're using the keyboard though, as this should be easily solved by doing the same thing with the trackpoint.

Oh, and suspend works perfectly fine by the way, I suspended several times yesterday, just by closing the lid too. No issues waking up.

 

Do you guys get popping noises when you shut down your laptops?

 

How on earth do I turn on the backlit keyboard?

Edit: nevermind... fn+space

 

any advice on what to do with the 16gb M.2 drive and a 500 gb hdd? swap on the M.2? Install the OS on the M.2?

 

If you want as a Linux user it's quite easy to keep under 16GB for your / partition, so you could install Linux on it, but it seems like a hassle. I don't know if anyone has really benchmarked the M.2 drive to see how fast it is but my guess is that it's fairly slow for an SSD (though obviously faster than an HDD or else it would be useless). Personally I think it's much more useful to put in a bigger SSD in replacement of the HDD like a lot of people have been doing. Due to black Friday sales you can get some good ones for pretty cheap (I think I've seen the Samsung 840 EVO 250GB go on sale for $140 which is a steal).

 

Hi folks,

As promised, I've created a GitHub repo where I'm going to keep my T440s Linux customizations updated:

https://github.com/ScottGarman/thinkpad_t440s

I'm definitely not 100% happy with the touchpad changes there, but it definitely improves things. I welcome additional feedback or changes that can improve things further.

Scott

 

To enable the new cpu states "intel_pstate", it seems that you have to use kernel 3.12.

 

Re: touchpad

Has anyone seen this? Thoughts?

Pimp up the touchpad of your notebook - Linux Mint Community

 

Another thing I noticed:

Sometimes when I watch videos in VLC, wearing headphones, then close the video, a really loud blast of noise goes through the headphones. It's akin to if you were talking on the phone with someone, and they all of a sudden blew really hard into the phone. I also got it once when I was shutting down.

 

bonesbrigade2: I too have sometimes noticed some static-y noise sounds when using headphones, but it's been an intermittent thing. When the system starts doing it, I find I'll get a burst of the noise immediately after changing the volume or doing something that plays a sound.

In other news, I've continued to keep playing with my touchpad settings, as they still haven't been dialed in the way I wanted them to. However, this evening I came across this posting from an X1 Carbon user:

Get a rock-solid Linux touchpad configuration for the Lenovo X1 Carbon | major.io

and I'm thinking this may be the configuration I've been looking for. The cursor feels stable and much more like the touchpads I've used in the past under Linux. In particular the options that I like best at this moment are:

Option "LockedDrags" "1"
Option "FingerLow" "40"
Option "FingerHigh" "45"
Option "MinSpeed" "1"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
Option "ConstantDeceleration" "4"

This is also having removed the Horiz/Vert Hysteresis values I was using previously. I'm going to give this a few days, and if things still look good, I'll update my synatpics Xorg config file in my GitHub repo (mentioned earlier in the thread).

Also, for Ubuntu Saucy users who want to try out the 3.12 kernel with the new Intel pstate cpufreq driver, here are some binary packages which are working well for me:

Index of /~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.12-saucy

Scott

 

I saw this post as well but do not like the output. Setting the FingerLow/High makes me feel like I have to apply more pressure than necessary to the trackpad. I am currently setting my Horiz/Vert Hysteresis to 50.


On another note, I had some trouble getting Bumblebee to enable my GPU correctly (Ubuntu 13.10). I had to run a 3.11 kernel and install the nvidia-319 package from apt. I found the information from this answer http://askubuntu.com/a/348642/222858.

 

nevermind, found a fullhd tiling screenshot and scaled that, thanks

 

Has anyone attempted dual booting any version of Linux with Windows 8.1 on the T440s? I have dual and triple booted Linux with Win7 on a desktop computer, but I am not familiar with the gotchas of the newer technologies such as secure boot, UEFI BIOS, etc. Hopefully I can get it to work without reinstalling Windows, but I will do whatever is necessary.

 

Yup, it works fine. My advice is upgrade to Windows 8.1 first because the upgrade process reinstalls the windows bootloader so you'd have a minor hassle reinstalling GRUB again. GRUB does support UEFI out of the box on Ubuntu 13.10 at the least (probably 13.04 as well).

 

Thanks. I am going to try Centos first, but it probably will have issues with the newer hardware, so my second choice is either Linux Mint Debian or Fedora.

 

So is the touchpad a big problem? Everything about this laptop sounds great but I would be running Ubuntu all the time... kind of concerned.

 

I managed to configure it quite well ... still can't say it's better than a mouse

In "Mouse and Touchpad":
- acceleration 0.8
- sensitivity 30px
- disable while typing,
- tap to click
- two finger scrolling
- horizontal scrolling

More importantly, my synaptics config file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf)

Code:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
# Additional options may be added in the form of
#   Option "OptionName" "value"
# See man synaptics (4) for details

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad ignore duplicates"
 # Ignore events from old driver
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchOS "Linux"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/mouse*"
 Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "touchpad catchall"
 # Device
 Driver "synaptics"
 MatchIsTouchpad "on"
 MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

 # Palm detection
 Option "PalmDetect" "on"
 Option "PalmMinWidth" "4"
 Option "PalmMinZ" "1"

 # Corresponds to "Synaptics Noise Cancellation"
 Option "HorizHysteresis" "30"
 Option "VertHysteresis" "30"

 Option "FingerLow" "40"
 Option "FingerHigh" "40"

 # Enable edge scrolling, you can disable this
 Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"

 # Dragging & tapping
 Option "LockedDrags" "on"
 Option "LockedDragTimeout" "400"
 Option "FastTaps" "on"

 # Speed and acceleration
 Option "AccelFactor" "0.15"
 Option "MinSpeed" "0.5"
 Option "MaxSpeed" "1.9"

 # For hardware debugging only
 Option "SHMConfig" "off"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
 # Lacking mouse buttons
 MatchDriver "synaptics"
 Option "LTCornerButton" "1"
 Option "RTCornerButton" "2"

 Option "SoftButtonAreas" "60% 0 0 2500 40% 60% 0 2500"
 Option "AreaTopEdge" "2400"


EndSection

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Multi-finger taps"
 MatchDriver "synaptics"

 # The following works only via synclient
 Option "TapButton1" "1"
 Option "TapButton2" "3"
 Option "TapButton3" "2"
EndSection

# End of configuration file

This configuration does the following:

Tap with one finger -> left click
Two fingers -> right click
Three fingers -> middle click

Click touchpad upper left corner (where red "button" is drawn) -> Left click
Click middle upper part (the "bubbly" part, you can feel it) -> Middle click
Click right upper part -> Right click

Touch is ignored on top 1 cm of touchpad (buttons).

EDIT: Trackpoint is still almost unusable with this config. To use it, one would need to make a configuration that would disable the touchpad, but not the part with buttons if the trackpoint was being used. Or maybe tweak the palm detection settings?