Installing Fedora on an X200

NOTE

After more investigation I have discovered a consistent problem on my X200 with Fedora 9 or Rawhide. See the ACPI section, and please report if you have different experiences... the issue is that the machine restarts itself immediately following all power-off and suspend actions. This does not happen under the factory-restored Windows Vista, so perhaps there is some ACPI fix that needs to be done with Linux? I don't even know where to start in providing feedback to developers on this.

Lenovo tech support was unhelpful, because they do not consider the device to be "designed for Linux".

Installation

The X200 lacks an internal optical drive, unless you get the media slice. 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.

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).

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.

Note: rawhide (Fedora 10) kernels bring in a graphics dependency which do not work right. You need to change xorg.conf to use the vesa driver instead of the i810 driver on rawhide! While the console seems broken, I was able to ssh into the laptop to diagnose this. You can manually set the 1280x800 mode in xorg.conf with the vesa driver.

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.

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 basic hibernate appears to function with Fedora 9 x86_64, with one caveat.

There seems to be a problem with the laptop immediately re-awakening from suspend, hibernate, and even power-off commands. If you press and hold the power button while it is attempting to restart, you can finally force it to remain off. This works for shutdown -h and hibernate, but not suspend (since it resumes too quickly and you will be powering off the live system).

On the immediate resume from suspend, with the vesa driver, the LCD is not functional. Hibernating and resuming will restore the LCD, but switching to text console and back to X will not.