Lenovo X220i Linux

Lenovo X220i Linux

Lenovo X220i + Ubuntu 13.04

I recently moved to Ubuntu 13.04, with almost no problem.

wifi and wired network works fine
SSD disk (I have a Verbatim 128G SSD) works fine:
1. no swap partition
2. one partition only
3. /tmp /var/log in ramdisk
4. fstrim -v / in /etc/rc.local
camera works fine
ExpressCard XUSAB302EXC (2 x USB 3.0 ports) works after adding acpiphp in /etc/modules
Epson Perfection 2480 PHOTO worked after adding libsane-epson-perfection-2580_3.0-21arakhne1_all.deb

After installing, right before updating all packages, I experienced some “The systems is running in low-graphics mode” messages at reboot. These messages appeared randomly and apparently disappeared after updating (to kernel 3.8.0-19-generic).

Software added

From web sites
Google Chrome	+ calendar, dropbox and Kindle Cloud apps
Skype
Truecrypt	file and device encryption
KeepassX	(required additional packages, such as libxtst-dev): password manager running on Linux, Windows and MacOS/X
CodeWeaver CrossOver	runs my licensed Office 2004 perfectly
From repository
Development tools	g++, svn, emacs, cmake, k3b, ant, ocaml, erlang, qt4-default
Utilities	a2ps, pdftk, p7zip-full, alien, tesseract
System utils	indicator-cpufreq
Office	gnumeric
Writing papers	texlive, gnuplot, yEd (from web site), freemind, tex4ht
Teaching	xournal, ecasound, jarnal
Photo	gimp, ufraw, exif-tools, imagemagick

RAI

To see RAI programs I used the standalone tool described here. It works fine.

10.04

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 64bit, with no special settings, leaving the installer to resize the Windows partition to 100Gb (this left about 200G for Ubuntu). The repartitioning worked fine. When you reboot Windows a disk check is forced, as usual.

Most of the hardware worked fine out of the box including blue-tooth, wireless, special keys, touch-pad, suspend, screen back light control, card reader. Having recent experience in using Ubuntu on Mac (Mac Pro Intel), Acer netbooks (Acer One) and other more standard Xeon based architectures, I must say I never had such a smooth installation experience before.

Battery worked for close to 8 hours, when I tested it, with bluetooth switched off, wireless on, and default settings for video and processor (browsing, sending emails, editing files, a couple of 5 mins runs of multithreaded code using 4 (virtual) cores 100%)
In order to have the trackpoint working, I installed gpointing-device-settings. Actually the track point works out of the box, but then you have to configure the wheel emulation using the gpointing-device-settings tool
the fingerprint reader does not work out of the box, I installed thinkfinger but the USB device is not recognized although it is listed in lsusb (still to work on this, low priority)

Debian

After a bad experience with Ubuntu 12.04 (compiz crashes, problems with the secondary video output, instable tools, etc.) I moved to Debian, which I'm using right now with much more success than Ubuntu. Everything works out of the box (I still have to check the fingerprint reader, actually) with Debian Wheezy (alpha testing version as of May 2012).