X301 Vista & Ubuntu Linux Installation

I figured this could be useful for anyone trying to set up their X301....

Windows 7
If your X301 comes without Windows 7 and you are upgrading to Windows 7 from a clean disc, then follow this set of instructions.

1. Upgrade BIOS to 3.06/3.07 from Lenovo.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70462
2. Install Windows 7.
3. Install UltraNav2 driver
64-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-72368
32-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-72372
4. Install System Interface Driver
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-67228
5. Install Intel Graphics Driver (Lenovo drivers required for Display hotkeys to work and achieve finer-grained display brightness adjustments)
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70129
6. Install Power Management driver
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-4GXPEG
7. Install Thinkpad Power Manager
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70601
8. Install HotKey Features
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-68000
9. Install LCD Monitor Profile
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62923

Optional:
10. Install WWAN driver
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-73681
11. Install Hard Disk Protection System (non-SSD models)
64-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-53150
32-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-53150
12. Fingerprint Driver
64-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/license.do?filename=thinkvantage_en/7wf459ww.zip
32-bit http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/license.do?filename=thinkvantage_en/7wf159ww.zip

Windows 7 automatically detects and installs the following drivers from Windows Updates, so this works out of the box:
1. Intel Wireless card + Ethernet port driver
2. Intel Display Driver (replace with Lenovo driver for hotkey support)
3. Webcam driver

Windows 7 also has enhanced network connectivity options, so it will also detect your WWAN card profile and configure it without requiring additional software.

Vista Issue
I was having problems trying to do a clean install of Vista Business x64 on the X301 as the Windows installation disc failed to use the generic AHCI driver and also failed to load the ICH9 driver that I provided. The Vista setup repeatedly ask the user to load a missing CD/DVD driver when the HDD is set to AHCI mode.

DO NOT ATTEMPT A CLEAN INSTALL BEFORE BACKING UP C:\DRIVERS and C:\SWTOOLS to an external storage device.

I solved this by performing the following steps:
1) From original Lenovo image, backup C:\DRIVERS\VISTA64\IMSM\Vista\IaStor.sys
2) In BIOS, under Config, change the HDD mode to Compatiblity.
3) Install Vista from standard DVD.
4) Boot up Vista
5) Replace IaStor.sys from C:\Windows\System32\drivers with the one you've backed up earlier.
6) Shutdown PC
7) In BIOS, under Config, change the HDD mode to AHCI.
8) Boot up Vista

If it doesn't raise a BSOD, then the switch to AHCI mode is working.

You can then proceed to download and install all drivers from Lenovo's site. SP1 updates should automatically come through as there should be no further conflicts.

Ubuntu Issues
Ubuntu 9.10
No problems out of the box, even the WWAN card is detected and connects fine. I suggest installing the Thinkpad Fan Control utility.
Update to the latest kernel for WWAN resume capability.
WWAN and bluetooth can now be controlled via rfkill interface.

Thinkpad Fan Control Linux
The fans can get a little loud under Linux, so if you really want to control it, you can use this.
Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file or System > Administration > Software Sources > Third-Party Software > Add via GUI

Code:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/surban/ubuntu jaunty main

Then from the terminal

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tpfand

To launch the fan control GUI, go to System > Administration > Thinkpad Fan Control

More info
http://www.gamess.org/mediawiki/index.php/ThinkPad_Fan_Control

Ubuntu 8.10
UPDATE: Everything essential works out of the box with the latest 8.10 Beta release. I'd strongly recommend installing this rather than performing all the fixes below.
Latest 2.6.27-7 kernel update supports the 5300 card, incorporates the new X4500 graphics driver and fixes the e1000e ethernet bug.

Ubuntu 8.04
The latest stable release is 8.04 LTS, so this is what I installed. Alternatively, you can either recompile the 2.6.26/27 kernels for OOB support for the Intel 5100/5300 driver support or try out 8.10 which will be final in a month's time.

The LiveCD will not boot normally and you will get a BusyBox terminal. In order to fix this, hit F6 in the initial screen and enter "irqpoll" as part of the boot arguments to launch Ubuntu from the LiveCD.

The Intel 5100/5300 card is not recognised by default. You must perform the following steps as listed here:
First, you should do an apt-get upgrade to get the latest updated kernel image and modules, then reboot.

Code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.tar.gz
tar -xzvf iwlwifi*
sudo cp iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11/iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode /lib/firmware/2.6.24-19-generic
wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/2008/09/compat-wireless-old-2008-09-09.tar.bz2
bunzip2 compat-wireless-old-2008-09-09.tar.bz2
tar xf compat-wireless-2.6-old.tar
cd compat-wireless-2.6-old/

Type:

Code:

gedit config.mk

A file will open. Search for the string CONFIG_IWL4965_HT=y. Directly after that string, on a new line, add this string if it doesn't exist:

Code:

CONFIG_IWL5000=y

Then save and close the file, and finish the installation with:

Code:

make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo make load

Steps modified from:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5710211&postcount=4

The only catch here is to download this specific version of compat-wireless as the versions after this broke the 5300 card support again.
http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/2008/09/compat-wireless-old-2008-09-09.tar.bz2

Almost everything else works OOB for Ubuntu 8.04, including the webcam and sound. I did not test the fingerprint reader, but it should work as well as the drivers exist for it. Touchpad support sucks as this has the ALPS touchpad and its hopeless in Linux. The Active Protection System does not work in the X300/X301 as the hdaps project has yet to support the newer models.

To optimise battery life, set the power management for the wireless card as follow:
iwconfig wlan0 power on

There are other more sophisticated tweaks such as hard disk timeouts etc that you can play with. Installing powertop may be a good idea too.

 

thank u for sharing ur experiences here, i intend to check out ubuntu as well when the x301 will finally be available in europe in about two weeks.

would u mind giving some overall impressions of how u like the x301? is the 1.4GHz ok for everyday computing, eg internet, office, watching movies (HD)?

some thoughts - maybe even flaws from ur pov - would be highly appreciated.

 

I don't have much time to do a full review, but to answer your queries:
The X301 is a great ultraportable. The processor, even in the X300, is more than capable of handling everyday computing tasks. I can compile my programs just fine and the SSD gives a good performance boost.

Battery life is improved in the X301 and I get 6.5-7 hours with light to moderate use with Wifi on, but all other ports turned off. This is with the 6-cell extended battery and 3-cell bay battery.

The 6-cell provides approximately 4.5-5 hours of battery life.

The laptop is ultralight, ultrathin and the unique combination of a nice high resolution screen, SSD and touchpad is a feature set that I can't get on other notebooks. The Sony Z doesn't count for me as it was fragile and Sony cannot provide business level warranty support.

 

thank u so much for ur little resumee, all the points u made were as i wished them to be

its gonna be my first thinkpad, since july im thinkin about which one to buy. its tough with all those new awesome models comin out. most important factors are mobility, digital video output for use at home (without dockin), bright screen to work outdoors (in the shadow is ok for me). in those regards the x301 seemed the best choice, i was just lacking some info about how it actually performs in real usage.

 

Chris-

Thanks a lot for taking the trouble to put up this post; it's just about
the only page currently on the web discussing linux on the X301.

I've followed your instructions on building the wifi drivers and now
have Ubuntu Hardy running with wifi for my Intel 5300 card. I'm still
having a problem, however, and I wanted to check with you to see if you
had seen similar behavior.

What is happening to me is this: my wifi locks up my keyboard after about
two suspend/resume cycles. In more detail:

• I boot my X301 and log in.
• NetworkManager sees my wifi access point and connects me.
• Suspend & resume (with, say fn-f4 or lid-close).
• NetworkManager gets me back on the net.
• Suspend & resume a second time.
• What happens now is that the machine comes up, and I can use it. Meanwhile, NetworkManager is trying to get me on the net. After about 30 seconds, the syslog says
  
  Code:

  ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready

  As *soon* as this happens, (1) the keyboard goes catatonic, and (2) nm-applet's shows the "spinning circle" animation that it does when trying to get on the net. It stays this way permanently -- I never get back on the net, and the keyboard never comes back alive. What's odd is that, although the *keyboard* is catatonic, the *mouse* works: I can manipulate windows -- move them, select them, etc -- with the mouse, and even shut the machine down by using the mouse to select "shutdown" from the gnome menus. (However, at this point, the machine's frequently unable to go all the way down -- it frequently can't unmount /, so it winds up remounting it read-only and then hanging.)

I am completely stuck. I tried to manipulate the network using just
iwconfig and dhclient, without using the NetworkManager, but couldn't
even get on the network that way.

Have you experienced similar behavior? Might you have advice?

Thanks!

-Olin Shivers

 

The problem is with the latest Intel 5100 wifi link. This is a very new card. Try Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. That has the latest 2.6.27 kernel which should fix the issues.

 

I've got the same problem. You could either try wicd or wait it out for 8.10 which has the new kernels or compile a vanilla one for Hardy. Not sure if doing either will help.
Bottom line is Linux just doesn't work well with the newer chipsets as the drivers are still highly-experimental. Lenovo's stupid decision to use crappy Alps pointing devices doesn't help either.

UPDATE: Everything essential works out of the box with the latest 8.10 Beta release. I'd strongly recommend installing this rather than performing all the fixes below.

 

I gave up on getting Ubuntu Hardy to work with custom-compiled wifi drivers.

I installed the current beta release of Ubuntu Intrepid, which comes with a 2.6.27 kernel, and everything works: wifi, suspension, and X.

There was a recent problem involving the ethernet driver, e1000e -- initial Intrepid test releases used a buggy driver that would kill your ethernet chip. By "kill," I mean that the fix is to have your motherboard replaced. Ouch. (The issue was that the driver loaded broken firmware into the chip, which then rendered it catatonic, so you couldn't subsequently load corrected firmware.) Ubuntu was a little slow about turning this off. The beta release notes mention this issue, somewhat vaguely, and say that the driver is disabled. Yet I see the driver in /lib/modules. So, just to play it safe, I hand-delete e1000e.ko from my driver tree, and will simply operate wirelessly until the official launch of intrepid.

Thanks, again, Chris, for putting up this page.
-Olin

 

Can anyone of you happy X301 owners answer the following questions:

- Did you try the DisplayPort? Can it drive a 30" monitor (e.g. Dell) at its native resolution (2560 x 1600)?

- How audible is the fan? When idling? How about full load?

- Is the position of the Function (fn) and Control (ctrl) keys interchangable, either via BIOS or via Ubuntu keyboard hacks?

- Can someone post the output of "lspci -v" and "lsusb"?

Best regards,

Andreas

 

Hi chrixx. Have you done any kind of benchmarks to compare heat and battery life when running Vista vs. Ubuntu? Is the fan often on during normal usage? I remember reading that fan noise and heat were a problem with the X300.

Really glad to hear that everything is basically working with Ubuntu 8.10 out of box. The X301 looks like the ultimate ultra-portable.

 

Thanks for sharing

 

What exactly are the problems with the ALPS touchpad?

 

Is there a way to determine the manufacturer of the mouse in Ubuntu?

 

Chris,
When you say everything essential works out of the box, is that everything? gps, wifi, display port, heating/fan issues, dual battery management as one, camera, Everything? does anything not work, or cause a problem?
Thanks, I just want to be sure before I load it up.

 

thanks for sharing

i'm a happy X300 ubuntu user, recently i faced some slowness due my SSD is 99% full so i believe i'm wiping out vista to use it fully for ubuntu and see the speed boost

btw i run 8.04 and had to compile sound driver (alsa i believe) to have it workfing but the volume keys on the keyboard doesn't work smoothly though

ill upgrade to 8.10 when to goes stable

thanks for sharing

 

Do you use VirtualBox? You can run Windows as a virtual machine within Ubuntu for anything you need Windows for. And, if you ever want to free up the disk space, you can just delete your virtual install of Windows.

P.S. Ubuntu 8.10 stable comes out tomorrow

 

i installed virtualbox but never had the time to test it out will do when i move my things to my new W500

i had to install 8.10 beta over there to get things detected just need to run an rsync between the two and start paying with everything with the x300, can't play now with it since my x300 is my main machine

 

GPS/WWAN doesn't work because there are no drivers for the Ericsson card used in the X301.

Wifi works out of the box, even upon hibernate/suspend and resume.
I'd presume display port works only on the latest Intel 2.5 drivers, not on the ones preloaded in Ubuntu currently.
No heat/fan issues.
Dual battery is recognised and dynamic switching works.
Camera works with Skype.

 

What's the battery life you get in ubuntu compared with windows?

 

Thanks, that's good to hear. I'll keep checking in here. looks like I'll make the switch soon.

 

i got 2.5-3.5hrs on my 6 cells battery with the x300

maybe due the fact there is nothing like the windows controlling where you can slow the machine or choose the energy saver stuff?

 

If you are using Ubuntu (with Gnome) you can right click the top panel, select Add to Panel. Then add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet. This will show you what frequency the CPU is running at in real-time and you can also select a power scheme. Powersave will give you maximum battery.

Another thing you can use to increase battery life is powertop. After installing, you need to run it with sudo in terminal. Then you can shut down hardware such as bluetooth etc. to maximise battery life.

BTW, I'm running Intrepid 8.10 now and it is highly recommended.

 

i do have the CPU freq. but how to set Poewrsave ?

installing powertop to check things

speaking for 8.10 i can upgrade or need to install from CD on top of my 8.04?

 

i installed powertop and got things like:
Suggestion: increase the VM dirty writeback time from 5.00 to 15 seconds with:
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

and

Suggestion: Disable 'hal' from polling your cdrom with:
hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom 'hal' is the component that auto-opens a
window if you plug in a CD but disables SATA power saving from kicking in.

and

Suggestion: Enable SATA ALPM link power management via:
echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
or press the S key.


what are these?

 

It is usually recommended that you do a clean install. I haven't tried doing a distribution upgrade with synaptic, although some people say it works flawlessly. I prefer to have a fresh machine.

You can enable CPU frequency scaling in 8.04 by running this command in terminal:

That will give you the options in the applet.

 

recommendations to save power, give them a try and you can see how many watts the thinkpad is using up.

With my W500, I disabled a lot of the gnome processes and that helped me bring my wattage down to about 12 watts, for 6-7 hours on a 9 cell.

 

Just installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Lenovo x301. It's almost perfect: Skype does not call for some audio troubles and the webcam does not work either... Audio works great otherwise.

Well, just playing around with Skype's options and rebooting made it! Sorry for the useless post.

Anyway, I am sooo happy with my x301 and Ubuntu!

 

Hi giff. Do you have the temperature sensors applet installed? I'm curious what the X301 runs at in celsius when idling.

 

After one hour of idling the sensors showed 36 C for both the cores, checking my email and writing this made it grow to 37 C. HTH.

 

That is pretty cool. My M1330 is running at 46 C right now after light use. What is the ambient temperature like?

 

Well mine gets easily up to 50 when watching videos and so, now for instance I have been looking to a couple of southpark episodes and it says 52 C. Temperature in the room is about 20 C.

 

Hi,

I just installed linux on my x301.
With all power management tweaks, radios off and brightness at middle, powertop reachs 8W.

What are your results ?
thanks

 

I wanted to check in here. Have any of you guys upgraded to 9.04? Any heat issues? Is mobile broadband working? Anything else?
Thanks

 

Don't have the time to try. The Intel drivers are still a little screwy on 9.04, as are the audio problems, so I'm not keen on trying 9.04 for at least another month or so when I get some free time.

 

I've updated this to include Windows 7 setup instructions for clean install on the X301.