Installing OpenSUSE 11.4 on a ThinkPad X220 Tablet

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Model

Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Tablet 4299-2PG (NYN2PMH) with

The Windows bit

Windows7 professional comes pre-installed. It works swift on this machine

Installation

There is no internal optical disk, so I used an external drive (Samsung, feeds from two USB ports). Worked flawlessly without the need to change BIOS settings.

Screen, network etc all detected correctly out of the box, except touchscreen. The package installation (GNOME and KDE together) only took about 15 minutes (!) WWAN not tested yet, but that did work well on my X301.

Disk partitioning

The system was shipped with an 160GB SSD disk (SSDSA2M160), with three partitions

  • 1 GB NTFS "System_DRV"
  • 132 GB NTFS "Windows7_OS", drive C: with 30GB used
  • 16 GB NTFS "Lenovo_Recovery"

No D: partition to sacrifice. The default partitioning change offered by SuSE installation seems ok, but I like to take it in my own hands. So, I

  • resized partition Windows7 back to 50GB, mounted on "/windows/c"
  • add extended partition for the rest
  • add 20GB partition for SuSE "/" with ext4 and noatime
  • add 20GB partition, later to be used for Debian/Qimo with ext4 and noatime
  • add 2GB partition for swap (hopefully not used)
  • add remaining 40GB for partition "/home" with ext4 and noatime

Configuration

Add "tabletpc" to the software selection. I also use both KDE and GNOME window managers via the software selection menu.

Fixing the touchscreen

You need a recent xf86-input-wacom driver to connect to the wacom interface. The first step should be to run the script which is included in [1], however that does not suffice... help?

Install more

Additionally, you want to install more. Configure "automatic update" via YaST and then deselect the external DVD unit from the repository list. You may like my choices from below.

Skype

The default installation is 64bits. Skype does not offer a 64bit version for OpenSuSE (yet), so you have to install some additional libraries for it to work: 

 # required for Skype 2.2beta
 zypper in xorg-x11-libXv-32bit libqt4-32bit libqt4-x11-32bit libpng12-0-32bit

Webcam, sound and microphone worked without further configuration.

Multimedia

Go to Community Restricted Formats for a one-click install of proprietary drivers. I selected both the KDE and GNOME extensions.

Modifications

Display Brightness

I really hate the automatic dimming the screen. With the excellent battery-life and working brightness-control buttons, there is no need for the frequent dimming.

Under GNOME, click on the battery image on the lower bar, select "Preferences". In "On Battery Power", untick the "Reduce backlight brightness" and "Dim display when idle".

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