Installing Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on a ThinkPad X201

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Revision as of 22:03, 27 February 2011 by Dagolden (Talk | contribs) (X201 brightness and i915 errors tips)
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TODO
Very preliminary installation report, will write more hopefully soon

Installation

I used an USB CD/DVD drive (41N5629, USB 2.0 Super Multi-Burner Drive with LightScribe) to install from the desktop CD.


Dual-booting Windows 7

Telling the Ubuntu installer's partitioner to put Ubuntu and Windows side by side will leave the pre-installed Windows 7 operational. The Rescue and Recovery partition cannot, however, be booted. If you ever think that you will be needing to reinstall your Windows or use Rescue and Recovery, please make the rescue discs from Windows before installing Ubuntu.


What works out of the box

What needs some tweaking

Qualcomm Gobi 2000 WWAN

The Mobile broadband can be made to work with Network Manager with

 sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-wwan-lucid-generic
 sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/gobi
 sudo cp -p '/windows/c/Program Files/QUALCOMM/Images/Lenovo/UMTS/amss.mbn' /lib/firmware/gobi/
 sudo cp -p '/windows/c/Program Files/QUALCOMM/Images/Lenovo/UMTS/apps.mbn' /lib/firmware/gobi/
 sudo cp -p '/windows/c/Program Files/QUALCOMM/Images/Lenovo/6/UQCN.mbn' /lib/firmware/gobi/

and rebooting. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+bug/554099

Screen brightness controls

If your screen brightness controls are not working -- meaning the screen backlight does not change when pressing Fn+Home/End or when running on battery power, forcing the use of the thinkpad-acpi driver may help.

First, edit your /etc/default/grub file to add "acpi_osi=Linux" and "acpi_backlight=vendor" arguments to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. It should look something like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

Then run "sudo update-grub" to enable the new arguments. Then reboot.

i915 Symbols error on boot

You may notice an error on boot: "failed to get i915 symbols". A solution for that is as follows:

sudo -s
echo "i915" >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
update-initramfs -k all -u
reboot