Installing Fedora on an X200

Installation

The X200 lacks an internal optical drive, unless you get the expansion base. However, USB devices are bootable so you can use an external USB CD/DVD drive. You can also use a USB hard-drive containing ISO images if you want to boot a small install image and not burn a full DVD or CD-ROM set.

The standard Fedora 9 i386 and x86_64 kernels do not yet support the network devices, so a network-based installation is impossible. I installed using a local USB disk containing a DVD ISO image as the source media, and then also used a USB disk containing a current updates.newkey repo mirror to do the first round of yum updates (modifying the /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates-newkey.repo file to point to a local file:/// URL.

The Fedora 10 Preview kernel does support the gigabit ethernet interface. Once installed, the wireless is also supported.

USB Boot

It seems as though I can only boot from an external USB CD/DVD drive when it is connected to one of the ports on the left-hand side of the machine, and not the port on the right-hand side. I do not know if this is expected or if it indicates a BIOS flaw.

SATA

The internal SATA hard disk is detected and supported during the Fedora 9 x86_64 install.

Intel Gigabit Ethernet LAN

The drivers in the Fedora 9 installation media do not detect the LAN controller. The latest kernel-2.6.26.3-29.fc9 supports the LAN controller (verified with i686 kernel).

There was a brief period where the e1000e driver was disabled, but it is working again in Fedora 10 (rawhide) as well.

Intel 5100AGN WLAN

The drivers in the Fedora 9 installation media do not detect the WLAN controller, nor do the latest 2.6.26.3-29 kernels with the iwl-5000 firmware. The first Fedora kernel that seems to support this controller, using the iwlagn module, is the 2.6.27.0 kernel from rawhide.

Graphics

The integrated graphics is detected and supported during the Fedora 9 install and with the latest updates as of 2008-09-23.

I've been using rawhide kernels to get wireless support, but had to fall back to the vesa driver to get X to work that way. I finally see e1000e, iwlagn, and the intel driver for xorg all working at once as of 2008-10-16 with 2.6.27-13.fc10.x86_64! I started with a Fedora 9 x86_64 install that is up to date, and then did "yum --enablerepo=rawhide update kernel-* xorg-x11-* libdrm-*"...

With Fedora 10 Preview, the intel driver works but causes hangs during resume from suspend or hibernate. I am again back to the vesa driver in order to have suspend states working.

Trackpoint

The integrated trackpoint pointing device (the "pointy-stick") is detected and supported during the Fedora 9 x86_64 install.

Web Camera

The built-in webcam in the bezel is supported by the uvcvideo driver. It shows up as an attached USB device.

Bluetooth

The built-in bluetooth works with the btusb driver. It can be enabled and disabled via the thinkpad-acpi controls, which cause it to appear and disappear from the USB bus.

Sound

The integrated sound is detected and supported during the Fedora 9 x86_64 install.

ACPI Power Management

The cpuspeed functionality and cooling seem to work properly.

The status of suspend and hibernate seems to be changing frequently with updates to the kernel and other packages. I have switched to Fedora 10 (rawhide) so I cannot report on the ongoing Fedora 9 status.

On Fedora 10 Preview installed and updated via yum, suspend and hibernate work with the vesa xorg driver and hang on resume with the intel xorg driver. Also, there seems to be a bug with the hotkeys, causing a "double suspend" or "double hibernate" effect: it sleeps or hibernates a second time immediately after resuming, and then stays awake the second time you wake it up. If you trigger the suspend or hibernate via another GUI method and not hotkeys, it works correctly the first time.