Installing Debian Wheezy (7.0) on a Thinkpad X200s

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I have a Thinkpad X200s with:

  • Intel Core2 Duo processor SL9400 (1.86GHz, 6MB L2, 1066MHz FSB)
  • 12.1" TFT display with 1440x900 (WXGA+) resolution (LED backlight) 250 nits
  • Intel WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350

This model has no internal webcam.

I installed Debian Wheezy (7.0) using the Alpha 1 installer from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20120513.

WPA supplicant allowed an internet install, after adding the firmware. I was prompted to insert a USB stick with iwlwifi-5000-{1..5}.ucode on it. The firmware-iwlwifi package which I extracted from http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/firmware-iwlwifi had only iwlwifi-5000-{1,2,5}.ucode. This worked without a hitch. These files were automatically copied to /lib/firmware after the successful install.

I installed the standard gnome-desktop-environment task in tasksel, installing gnome-shell 3.2. Although I selected the "laptop" task, laptop-mode-tools was not installed.

Almost everything worked out of the box, including Wifi, Bluetooth, sound, suspend, brightness adjustments, and hibernate.

On Debian Squeeze, the wireless would not properly connect to WPA2-EAP with PEAP networks unless power management for the network card was turned OFF. Otherwise, there were random disconnects (reason=3 in syslog). I have not tested the new kernel with this wireless encryption yet.

As is normal for a Thinkpad, to get VT/KVM working, you have to enable it in the BIOS and disable AMT.

Things that do not work:

  • One thing that does not work properly is suspend-resume on lid close. The package "gnome-tweak-tool" must be installed to support changing these settings. This does work. However, it is not correctly picking up unplug events once one has been triggered. For example, if it is send to blank screen on AC and suspend on battery, if I close the screen on AC and unplug the AC, it should start to suspend. This does not happen. I have filed a bug report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=674048
  • gpointing-device-settings does not save middle-mouse scroll settings through reboot. This has been reported before: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=615092. I fixed this problem by creating ~/.bin/enable-middle-mouse.sh with the following contents and adding it to gnome-session-properties. (You must reach gnome-session-properties by alt-F2 or the terminal; it is no longer listed in the Settings menu for some reason.)
#!/bin/sh
xinput set-int-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Evdev Wheel Emulation" 8 1 
xinput set-int-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Evdev Wheel Emulation Button" 8 2 
xinput set-int-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes" 8 6 7 4 5
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