Moving Ubuntu 10.04 to a ThinkPad X220

Ubuntu 11.04 has too many annoying changes (and some irritating bugs that affect usability) to be considered as an option. Ubuntu 10.04 does not work out of the box on the Thinkpad X220, and in any case the X220 does not accept a 9.5mm-thick notebook drive — it needs one of the new 7mm slim drives — so one can't move the old drive to the new laptop.

Anyway, if you already have a working Ubuntu 10.04 installation on your machine and want to move it to your new X220 here's a simple recipe:

- boot the X220 with a Ubuntu 11.04 CD

- partition the disk in the X220 to your liking

- transfer your existing installation to the X220 disk over the network; I prefer using netcat + dump/restore, but rsync will work too

- chroot to your new installation

- add the following at the top of your /etc/apt/sources.list

   deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty main restricted universe

- as root, run the following:

 apt-get update
 apt-get install linux-image-generic-pae linux-firmware

- make sure you install a boot loader in the new disk

And that's all it takes. You'll end up with your existing 10.04 installation running a recent kernel that supports the hardware on the X220.

Graphics

The recipe above will use the framebuffer for your graphic session. It is recommended that you install the intel driver from glasen as described here