Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Ubuntu 11.04

This page is a stub for describing the process of installing and configuring Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220.

If you wish to backup the original Windows and Lenovo recovery partitions before installing Ubuntu, there is a guide on Think Wiki.

The current support statuses are based on a 64 bit install.

Overview

IconsPage/ok.png (works out-of-the-box)
IconsPage/ok.png IconsPage/info.png (works, with remarks)
IconsPage/warning.png (needs manual install)
IconsPage/dont.png (won't work)
IconsPage/question.png (not yet documented)

Installation

USB Installation

Works out of the box. Press F1 to access BIOS configuration, F12 to access boot device menu.

Network Installation

Works (according to ThinkWiki).

Power Management

Suspend

Works out of the box, including on models with USB 3.0 in 11.10 release.

Hibernate

Works out of the box (using the menu in the upper right corner of the screen).

However, the Fn+F12 keyboard shortcut has been reported not to work (one system hung before reaching hibernation state).

Reboot

Works out of the box.

Battery

Battery is detected and monitor reports correctly out of the box.

CPU Throttling

Works out of box (i7-2620M). Tested with ac (65 watt) and battery using 'stress -m 4' to add load.

Sensors

Works out of the box (i5-2540M), reports HDD speed and proc temp.

Display

Screen

Works out of the box.

Colors

Works out of the box.

3D Acceleration

Works out of the box.

VGA Port

Connecting an external monitor via the VGA port is automatically detected, however only the top bar is rendered and desktoparea and an applications are black. Seems to be a Natty issue than a hardware issue. Haven't investigated yet.

Seems to be this bug.

On 11.10, works out of the box, without bugs, using Awesome WM (not tested using Unity).

On 12.04, works out of the box in Unity.

Display Port

Works out of box (video and sound). Tested with HDMI adapter.

Input

Touchpad

Works out of the box with multitouch support in 11.10. Behavior can be changed in the preferences panel. . Works out of the box with touch to click and edge scrolling. Two finger and horizontal scrolling can be enabled in Mouse settings. Caveats:

  • Click and drag only works when the click is made at the very bottom edge of the touchpad.
  • Right click does not work
  • Mouse is somewhat "shakey" whilst touching the trackpad.

Unity supports the following multitouch actions:

  • 1 finger
    • tap = primary button click;
    • move = move the cursor;
  • 2 fingers
    • tap = secondary button click;
    • move = vertical/horizontal scrolling;
  • 3 fingers
    • tap = middle button click;

Right click can be fixed by patching the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package with the following these steps (source): 

mkdir tmpbuild
cd tmpbuild/
wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-1.3.99+git20110116.0e27ce3a/
cd debian/patches/
tar xfj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2 
ls -1 2*.patch >> series
cd ../../
sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_1.3.99+git20110116.0e27ce3a-0ubuntu12_amd64.deb

Trackpoint

Works out of the box in 11.10, including scrolling using the center button.

Works out of the box with the following caveat:

  • Center button does not enable scrolling

To fix center button scrolling. Install gpointing-device-settings 

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

To launch, press Alt-F2 and type "gpointing-device-settings".

In the trackpoint section, select “use wheel emulation” and set button to 2.

Keyboard

  • Key

    Support status

    Function

    Speaker mute

    Yes

    Volume down

    Yes

    Volume up

    Yes

    Mic mute

    No

    details

    ThinkVantage

    Yes

    Generates XF86Launch1

    Lock (F2)

    Yes

    Manage battery and power (F3)

    Yes

    Displays power information

    Sleep (F4)

    Yes

    Manage wireless (F5)

    Yes

    Toggles wifi and bluetooth

    Camera settings (F6)

    Yes

    Takes a photo in cheese

    Display settings (F7)

    Not tested

    Input device settings (F8)

    Yes

    Toggles trackpad)

    Hibernate (F12)

    Yes

    Invokes hibernate but hibernate fails

    Brightness up

    Yes

    Brightness down

    Yes

    Thinklight

    Yes

    Web browser back and forward

    Yes

    Multimedia controls

    Not tested

    Magnify

    No

Fingerprint Reader

Works with fingerprint gui

I/O

Ethernet

Works out of the box.

Wireless

Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205/Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300

Works out of the box.

Bluetooth

Not tested extensively but seems to work out of the box.

USB

Works out of the box.

USB3

Works out of the box. USB3 devices do not boot laptop.

CardReader

Works out of the box. Tested using a 2 GB SD card and 8 GB class 4 SDHC card.

Integrated mobile broadband

On ThinkPad X220 4291, mobile broadband works out of the box. The mobile broadband module is an Ericsson F5521gw (USB vendor/product ID 0bdb:1911).

Other ThinkPad X220 models have the Gobi 3000 mobile broadband module which has been reported not to work out of the box. However, open source drivers appear to be available.

Webcam

Works out of the box. Tested using Cheese/Skype/GTalk plugin for Firefox.

Sound

Speaker and audio jack work out of the box.

Microphone

Works out of the box.

References

Recent MacBook Pro documentation and the X201 and X220 documentation on ThinkWiki.

CategoryHardware CategoryHardware

X220 (last edited 2013-12-14 01:50:33 by knome)