T440s under linux

Code:

options snd_hda_intel enable=0,1
options snd slots=snd_hda_intel, thinkpad_acpi
options snd_hda_intel index=0
options thinkpad_acpi index=1

 

If anyone is intrested - after trying different synaptics configs, this gave me the best result (middle clicking works good)

Code:

Option "SoftButtonAreas" "55% 0 0 2600 30% 55% 0 2600"
Option "AreaTopEdge" "2600"

 

Aha, it worked. Thanks!

 

I'm having issues with iwlwifi not reconnecting to wifi after recovering from sleep (for the record I have a T440p not a T440s, but it should all be the same in terms of wifi). Anyone have any ideas why this would be?

I'm running BIOS 1.14 (because of the issues with Optimus in 1.15 and on) and have never had this problem until yesterday.

 

Now that there is a new BIOS for the t440s out (2.19) I had to figure out how to upgrade it from Linux. Lenovo provides a program for Windows and a bootable ISO, but I don't have a CD drive. First I tried booting from an ISO image using memdisk, but that didn't work. I believe it's because the ISO expects EFI, but memdisk only boots old style BIOS disks.

I found a solution that works well enough. I used geteltorito to extract the boot image from the ISO image. The I ran dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sdc where sdc is a scratch USB drive ( this will erase the drive). Then I hit F12 during boot, selected the USB drive, and followed the instructions to update. It worked without any problem.

 

have you noticed any benefits with the new bios?

 

BIOS Update Bootable CD for Windows 8.1 (64-bit), 8 (64-bit), 7 (32-bit, 64-bit) - ThinkPad T440, T440s

 

Hi, I am not very good at linux, so may be you could help me with this problem:
problem with nvidea drivers at Lenovo T440p and bios problem - Ask Ubuntu

 

There is that angeled little line at the top of the touchpad, does it detect touch locations to you? i have a problem with that not giving me the good click behaviors.

for example, if you try to close a tab with a middle click using only the little angeled part, does it work as expected?

it's really annoying

 

That part of the new clickpad surface is not touch sensitive, and clicking when touching only that part will work as left click

 

That's really bad. How can you disable that part?

 

T440s with Ericsson N5321

Linux mint 16 / Ubuntu 13.10

Doesn't seem to work.

Seems to register on GSM network , attempts connection, then mobile broadband option disappears from network settings and I get modem disconnected message.

Anybody seen/fixed this?

 

I've installed Ubuntu 13.10 on my new T440s. I'm impressed on how fast it runs, however battery life sucks. I've tried with TLP, but no dice. Battery last for 1.5 hours compared to Win 7 hours. I wonder if you guys have a more successful experience.

 

Eh, it's pretty clear that the top part is not touch sensitive. Like, physically it's a different material. He's not talking about software. I actually have set a bigger dead zone at the top because I use the trackpoint but the part he's referring to is not part of that.

 

I just installed Ubuntu 13.10 on my X240. The battery icon in the menu bar only displays the charge for the removable battery. Once it emptys, the system moves over to discharging the second battery just fine, but the icon remains red and shows no power.

Does the T440s do the same? Anyone know how to fix this, or know of a 3rd party applet that works properly? The built in icon can be disabled.

 

I have gentoo with tlp and get about 6-7 hours light use (wifi on / screen 50%).
Have you installed powertop and looked at its suggestions?

 

For me it correctly switches to the second battery when the first is discharged. Although I don't actually use GNOME or Unity, but at least the login screen should be using the same widget.

For the guy who had 1.5hr battery life, are you sure it wasn't just the first battery discharging? I don't think that even at full blast playing games you could discharge both batteries in 1.5hr.

 

Hi All,

I've been searching last 3 days continuously to get RTL8192EE driver working in my lenovo t440s which I got few days back.

03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 818b
Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 001b
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 9
I/O ports at 3000
Memory at f0400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>

finally i found a link where it got all the required driver source code. I'm able to compile on Ubuntu 13.10 and loaded. However, connection speed is very low in 60kB/s at max. Practically its useless.

I've bought TLINK WN725N nano wireless usb and it works out very well as of now.

If you would like to give a try, here is the link has OEM driver for 8192EE

Index of /updates/pool/public/o/oem-wireless-rtl-92ce-92se-92de-8723ae-88ee-8723be-92ee-dkms

i've added few output to this bug.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578

Thanks

 

You are absolutely right. I've just learnt that it is actually showing the first battery discharging. So overall I would say I have about 3-4 hours, which is better, but not good as Win. I've tried powertop, but the tunable settings are keep switching to Bad when I close the app or reboot. Not sure TLP is making any difference.
A fix to the battery icon would be great.

 

It was actually showing the first battery discharging. So overall I'm getting 3-4 hours. I've tried powertop, but the tunables switch to "bad" as soon as I close the app or reboot.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thinkpad T440s: Core i7-4600U | 1920x1080 IPS Display | 8GB RAM | 240GB Intel 530 | Intel 7260AN

 

I have Ubuntu 13.10 working well on the T440s. I basically took out my SSD running 13.10 on my T420 and popped it into the T440s, fixed the issue with brightness and trackpad and was good to go.

Battery life with the 6+3 cell seems to be great. Around 10 hours or so. This is on kernel 3.11. I tried 3.12 from ubuntu mainline but resume from suspend fails consistently. Has anyone been able to get 3.12 working on ubuntu 13.10 without bugs?

 

OK, so I ended up switching to Mint 16 w/Cinnamon.(Although I had to disable EFI to install). I now get 6-7 hours and the applet displays the combined battery power. Quite happy now
As for the touchpad, I used zenlinux settings, although I'm not using syndaemon, I'm using this settings in the .conf file:

PalmDetect=1
PalmMinWidth=5
PalmMinZ=50

So far is going well.

 

Hi,

Also using Mint 16.

Does the battery power applet show the combined percentage in the panel next to the battery icon or only shows both batteries and combined percentage when you click on that battery symbol and popup the menu?

Also can you get it to show remaining time?

Michael

 

Not Linux specific, but it's easy to check if you're running one:

Does the T440s BIOS allow the ATA secure erase command?

You can check by issuing hdparm -I /dev/sdX, where X is the letter corresponding to an internal storage device. This does not issue the erase command, so you are safe. The output should include a line saying "not frozen."

Source: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

 

Hey guys, I also have a T440s, I have a few questions about the linux issues I had:

- Touchpad, what is the status of a updated synaptics version or something directly from lenovo to use the full functionality of the touchpad + trackpoint?
- CPU, I have noticed that my i5 4200U under Linux only runs with 800 MHz, do you also have this problem and a solution for that?
- intel graphics, I have seen that intel has released a graphics driver for Ubuntu 13.10 ( https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads) what is the effect of it, because I think I had no driver installed yet!

if you have any other issues or tips I would be thankfull!
actually I had to switch to win but I'm pretty sure that I will come back with Ubuntu 14.04, and then I will be prepared

 

T440s / Linux Mint 16 / Ubunutu 13.10

Having trouble getting the web cam to support video.

Both with cheese and Komaso apps photos are fine but video causes the app to freeze.

Worse - half the USB devices then disappear from lsusb and only a reboot seems to fix.

Sound familar to anyone?

 

Yes, it does. I use ATA password on a Crucial M500 SSD, and I did a secure erase before installing Debian Linux. I obviously can't guarantee it did something for real – who knows what goes on inside the firmware of a drive – but at least hdparm did show it succeeded. You need to boot from a live CD like Ubuntu, the Debian "netinst" images for instance don't contain hdparm. You also need to "unfreeze" the drive by making it go to sleep ("suspend" should work) before hdparm can do anything.

Note that if you want to set an ATA password, hdparm and the BIOS are NOT COMPATIBLE; hdparm sets the password to the ASCII values of the characters, but the Lenovo BIOS sets the password to a hash based on the characters or perhaps keyboard scan codes. If you set a password with hdparm, you will not be able to match it when entering it in the BIOS. There is no information available about how Lenovo hashes the password when set in the BIOS.

I worked around this problem by setting the "user" password in the BIOS and then the "master" password with hdparm. So the "user" password is stored hashed in a way the BIOS understands, and the "master" password is stored as-is so hdparm and other utilities can access it. Make sure to set security mode to "high" instead of "maximum" with hdparm; this way it should be possible to unlock the drive on other (non-Lenovo BIOS) computers using the "master" password.

I also noticed, and this is important, that the T440s doesn't boot or enter the BIOS without unlocking the primary drive if that drive has an ATA password set. If you lock yourself out, you can't enter the BIOS anymore either, so you have to jump through some hoops to reset the ATA password on the drive first otherwise you won't be able to access the computer at all.

ATA security is questionable, but it should at least be sufficient to repel casual nosy people or common thieves. I hope Linux will have support for offloading the crypto to the SSD in the future (whatever extensions Microsoft calls "eDrive").

 

The synaptics driver works quite well for me: tapping works, clicking works, the trackpoint works; you can even set the "buttons" on the top of the touchpad to act like real buttons and ignore mouse movements. I'm not a fan of the "whole touchpad is a button"–approach, but the touchpad is definitely usable. The only issue that remains is that the pointer jumps a bit when you click something and your finger slips, so you occasionally miss the target. That's not a bug, it's just a sensitivity issue... I think Apple's OSX tries to guess when it's going to be a tap/click and adds a delay during which the touchpad ignores movement temporary after finger-down. Maybe I need to play with the settings a bit more...

I don't know what you mean about your CPU running at low MHz; I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary and I'm sure CPUs generally work fine in Linux. In fact, Linux has better CPU support than Windows as more CPUs are supported and code gets compiled a lot more often, picking up specific features and optimisations through compilers and the kernel. Just run a recent version of your favourite distribution.

About the Intel Graphics: drivers come with your distribution and are compiled and linked with versions of Mesa, Xorg and other packages. If you install a recent graphical environment like Gnome, KDE or whatever, you should have a recent version of X and drivers. I strongly advise not to mix non-distribution drivers with your installation unless you really know what you're doing; especially so for Intel drivers, because the included drivers are usually quite up to date (thanks to Intel). Update your drivers by updating your distribution.

 

For those of you having the problem with a loud crackle and other terrible sounds via the headphones when not playing sounds, this seems to be related to audio powersave with TLP.

I edited /etc/default/tlp and changed these lines to turn them off:

I had to power off and back on before it took.

-Dan

 

the combined is when you click on the battery symbol. I hid the % and time remaining labels from the battery icon as I it doesn't look good.

 

ok, that was also my last status with the clickpad, but one thing is not working and that's scrolling with Mitddle Button + Trackpoint... I really hope there comes a solution for that, because the trackpoint is one of the best things on a Lenovo!

I once checked my CPU frequency and i saw that it always runs at 800 MHz but it should run at higher frequencies when doing work.. I thought thats maybe a issue or something.... the good thing is that even with 800 MHz on Linux everything was much faster then with the full bandwidth under windows
But maybe someone can check there CPU frequency?

thanks for the Info!


After this 2 Weeks without Linux I never looked so hard forward to install it again in a few weeks!

 

Has anyone gotten the fingerprint scanner working? When I run powertop I notice that supposedly the USB device corresponding to the fingerprint scanner (usb-device-138a-0017) is using a lot of power (apparently doing nothing) but I'm not sure how to actually get it working. When searching for that USB device I found these two patches which might be relevant to adding support, but I don't have the time to figure that stuff out right now (exam season for me). If anyone is more bored than me I would appreciate it if someone else could try these patches out and report back.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61692

https://github.com/ars3niy/fprint_vfs5011/pull/8

 

Thanks a lot for the tip, helps a lot.

And great news everyone!

[ANNOUNCE] xf86-input-synaptics 1.7.99.1

The newest RC of xf86-input-synaptics has Thinkpad clickpad support! I might have to test this out later.

 

This might not be the right place to ask but I am receiving my T440s soon and I will be dual booting Linux and Windows 8. I haven't worked a whole lot with linux before, but I know very basic commands like cd, mkdir, etc.

I am a CSE major and I will be taking a problem solving class where we will be programming in C, but we need to use things like SSH to hand in homework and they highly recommend using a Linux IDE to write code because when we get to upper division classes we will be using Linux quite extensively.

A few friends of mine who are CS seniors recommended I install Arch Linux to learn what Linux has to offer. Would you guys recommend Arch Linux to a Linux novice or should I install something more user friendly like Linux Mint as a start?

Also, I've been looking over this thread and it seems like there aren't any major issues with the T440s and Linux, but is there anything I should be particularly careful about?

Thanks!

 

Eh, that's a bad idea IMO and anyone suggesting Arch to a beginner is a jerk. You can learn Linux fine using Ubuntu. Plenty of long time Linux users use it because it's got relatively sane defaults and a lot of packages which are kept up to date.

Arch is nice if you want to control exactly what gets installed by starting from a very minimal base, and you want to live on the bleeding edge of updates. But it will take you a while just getting to a working system in my experience so for a beginner it's not a useful distribution IMO.

 

very nice!!!
sorry for the maybe stupid question, but will that driver be included in 14.04 Ubuntu already?

 

No, 14.10 most likely
Would make sense to build it yourself if on 14.04

 

Hey guys,
did anyone have any luck with getting CircularScrolling working with the synaptics drivers?
Adding the options as outlined in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Circular_Scrolling doesn't do the trick for me

 

would be happy for a short how-to

 

would be happy for a short how-to

 

A short report, received my T440s and run it with Linux Mint 16 and Cinnamon 2.0.14.

- I have the AUO (no touch!) display - which is truly magnificent. I enjoy working on this machine, Full HD on 14" ia a match made in heaven.
- Keyboard is magnificent. Fast and accurate, with a very nice feedback for a notebook keyboard - a joy to type on.
- Most of the time it's dead silent - fan inactive, while remaining cool at all times. Under heavy load fan still not an issue at all.
- Clickpad is horrible in its default configuration. The clicky noise it makes might be the most annoying thing I've ever experienced with a notebook.
- Gathered fixes here: https://github.com/LFDM/dotfiles/tree/master/t440s. If you use a sane configuration file the clickpad is actually quite ok, if you can avoid two things: Never click on it, use tap only. And don't use the trackpoint.. which is a shame really, but right now it's not really possible to use it effectively. Taken these two points into account I have no real issues with the clickpad.
- The README in that github repo also contains hints for some startup issues.

The biggest problem that's left for me right now is the wrong battery monitoring. Panel always shows the status of the internal battery, only when you clck to open up the detailed pop-up you can see what your battery status really is.
And if someone cares: After some days you can already see that I used the clickpad, very oily look, which is not an issue for me personally though.

All in all I am really happy, well spent money, really a fantastic machine and running fine under Linux.

 

Agree with all of LFDMs comments.

One additional on the battery monitoring is that if you hot swap another battery in - which you can do with the T440s power bridge technology - linux mint will not detect the presence of the new battery until the power lead is plugged in again. Fortuantely it still seems to run off the swapped in battery but the battery monitoring looks confused about the state of the of the battery - 5% remaining but 10 hours - that sort of thing.

 

what is your output of acpi -V | grep capacity ?

 

is someone else having troubles with the wifi taking long time to connect?
I am using arch it takes about 5-10 until i get connectivity, but once i am connected the speeds are excellent.

 

I'm trying to replace the wireless card for an intel 7260 AC (Should have ordered it in the first place, anyhow). Can anyone tell me if this is the right model?
Amazon.com: 7260NGW Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11ac, Dual Band, 2x2 Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.0* - Ships from California. In STOCK: Computers & Accessories

 

@rubuntu, unfortunately you need a whitelisted wifi card that is Lenovo branded. Within those Lenovo branded cards, you also must select one that is known to be in a shipping configuration of the T440s, or reported as such. To use non-Lenovo cards, you can possibly find/request a de-whitelisted BIOS image for your T440s on another forum, but it may brick your laptop and void the warranty.

 

Can someone explain the difference between "sleep" and "deep sleep" -
when I colse the lid the comptuer goes to sleep (red light blinking); sometimes,
or perhaps after a fairly long time, the red light seems to go out and
when I open the lid I get a bios-like screen which says:
"resuming from deep sleep".

this takes longer but the computer soon starts and is in the state it was
when I closed the lid ...

So, what is this "deep sleep" stuff (by the way, I do NOT have hibernation
set up)

 

Yeah that one confused me too until someone posted this:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo/692426-t430-2-suspend-modes.html#post8892496

 

hey guys,

has anybody of you tried to create a ad-hoc network with t440s?

I get the error 32 under Ubunut 14.04 "ad-hoc mode not supported by device"

my wireless adapter is

Code:

Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 6b)

can you please help me out?

 

7260 probably just does not support ad-hoc (I was mad when I realized it also
does not support 5ghz band)

What makes you think it does support ad-hoc?