Installing OpenSUSE 13.1 on a ThinkPad T430s

Model

Lenovo Thinkpad T430s 2356-LPG, BIOS G7ET90WW (2.50), ECP G7HT36WW (1.12)

General

This installation instruction describes these parts that do not or do not completely work after my OpenSUSE 13.1 DVD installation using KDE 4 as window manager.

Graphics

Using the default BIOS settings, the Switchable Graphics with Intel HD Graphics and NVIDIA Optimus may cause high power consumption. Thus, if you do not need the NVIDIA Optimus graphics, change the BIOS settings from Switchable to Internal graphics before installation. Please read Switchable Graphics for the pros and cons. Note that I did not test the NVIDIA Optimus graphics.

NOTE!

Any time you change the BIOS setting after installation, you may have to execute # mkinitrd in order to prevent loading of unnecessary modules.

Network

GPS

The Ericsson HSPA+ WWAN Minicard (H5321gw) must be configured every time before it emits GPS data, see H5321gw GPS.

LCD Brightness Buttons

The LCD brightness buttons stopped working because of a change in the 3.7 kernel. Adding acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2012\" as a kernel boot parameter using YaST reverts to the old kernel behavior. However, there is no on-screen display feedback in KDE.

Power Management

Suspend to RAM works out of the box. However, sometimes the ThinkPad reboots instead of shutting down. Installing the Laptop-mode-tools might help.[1] But thereby SATA Link Power Management will be activated by default and the Intel SSD 520 with 180 GB and 240 GB could time out on heavy I/O load. There is no fix from Lenovo, yet.[2][3] So, you have to set INTEL_SATA_POWER="0" in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/intel-sata-powermgmt.conf.

However, it seems to be sufficient to only set CONTROL_RUNTIME_PM=1 in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/runtime-pm.conf and to disable most things else in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf by setting ENABLE_AUTO_MODULES=0, CONTROL_READAHEAD=0, CONTROL_NOATIME=0, CONTROL_HD_POWERMGMT="0", and CONTROL_MOUNT_OPTIONS=0.