This is a guide to installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad X1 Fold 16.
Both work out of the box with no configuration or adjustments.
Works.
When used as a tablet, the system should automatically rotate between portrait and landscape. With the Gnome Shell under Xorg, this works as expected. Under Wayland, mutter/clutter looks for a switch to determine if should operate in tablet mode. Nothing exposes that switch out of the box, but we can install a simple daemon to observe the accelerometers and emulate it. See below.
Works in Wayland.
This is tied to the tablet mode described in the previous section. If Gnome Shell is in tablet mode, then touching an input field will automatically open the on-screen keyboard (OSK).
Under Xorg, there is a bug that prevents OSK keypresses from registering. This bug has been open for a while and it's not clear there is a lot of motivation for it to be resolved.
This works as expected after pairing (see below).
Fold it closed and it goes to sleep.
This doesn't work as it should, but we can get an acceptable approximation.
Ideally when the screen is folded up part-way and the keyboard placed on the bottom part of the screen, the computer should enter "laptop mode" where only the top half of the screen is used. I have not been able to find any information about the magnetic sensor that is used for this, nor have I seen any sign of it in input devices or i2c sensors. Therefore I have made a Gnome Shell extension with a quick setting to manually switch to laptop mode.
Additionally, under Wayland there is no ability to change the screen geometry to only use the top half of the screen. Therefore, the Gnome Shell extension also adds a black panel to the bottom of the screen to force Gnome to use only the top half. This works for almost all applications, with only an occasional dialog from Gnome itself appearing in the center of the screen, half-obscured by the keyboard.
This works well enough in practice.
Use Noble (24.04), this is the most recent that installs and works reliably for me.
Oracular (24.10) installed but consistently crashed during boot after installation.
The Plucky (25.04) installer segfaults as of 2025-02-14. Hopefully this will be fixed when the installer snap updates its embedded Gnome environment.
I recommend using Wayland due to the OSK bug. Installing the tablet-mode switch daemon is a simple fix for enabling tablet-mode, which addresses the only downside of Wayland compared to Xorg (at least as far as using the X1 Fold is concerned). The OSK bug under Xorg looks like a showstopper.
During installation, you can (and should!) choose to encrypt the disk, however, you will need the keyboard plugged in at boot for the first few boots until we configure the initrd with bluetooth support.
During installation, keep the keyboard plugged in with the USB cable. It will need to be paired later, but in the interim, it acts as a normal USB keyboard when plugged in.
The keyboard is a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device. The Gnome panel for Bluetooth pairing does not yet support BLE, so we need to pair it from the command line. After installation, run a scan to find the device id (mac address):
$ bluetoothctl
scan le
Examine the output to find the MAC address. My local environment was
quite busy and I found it helpful to use an app on my phone to
identify the keyboard. Once you have the id (12:34:56:78:9a:bc in
this example) enter the following it bluetoothctl:
connect 12:34:56:78:9a:bc
You should see output like:
[CHG] Device 12:34:56:78:9A:BC Connected: yes
[ThinkPad Bl]# Connection successful
[ThinkPad Bl]# Request authorization
[agent] Accept pairing (yes/no): yes
[ThinkPad Bl]# [CHG] Device
6B8C
12:34:56:78:9A:BC Bonded: yes
[ThinkPad Bl]# [CHG] Device 12:34:56:78:9A:BC Paired: yes
[ThinkPad Bl]# [CHG] Device 12:34:56:78:9A:BC Name: ThinkPad Bluetooth TrackPoint Keyboard
[ThinkPad Bl]# [CHG] Device 12:34:56:78:9A:BC Alias: ThinkPad Bluetooth TrackPoint Keyboard
[ThinkPad Bl]# [CHG] Device 12:34:56:78:9A:BC Modalias: usb:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When complete, enter:
scan off
And exit.
This is a simple daemon that watches the accelerometer and exposes a software tablet-mode switch. The Gnome Shell under Wayland expects such a switch to enable auto-rotation and the OSK.
To install, run as root:
apt install python3-evdev
wget -O /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.probos.TabletMode.conf https://github.com/jeblair/x1fold/dbus.conf
wget -O /usr/local/bin/tablet-mode https://github.com/jeblair/x1fold/tablet-mode
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/tablet-mode
wget -O /etc/systemd/system/tablet-mode.service https://github.com/jeblair/x1fold/tablet-mode.service
systemctl enable tablet-mode
In order for the bluetooth keyboard to work early in the boot process when prompted for a LUKS passphrase, we need dbus and bluetooth running from the initrd. Ubuntu typically uses update-initramfs to build the initrd image, but that process has no ability to support dbus and bluetooth. Many other modern GNU/Linux systems use dracut, and it can handle this. Fortunately, Ubuntu appears to be moving toward dracut, so we can use it today and expect it to be supported in the future as well.
First, ensure that the keyboard is paired and working under the fully booted system.
Second, make a backup of the initrd:
cp /boot/initrd.img /boot/initrt-back.img
Then install dracut and add some configuration options
apt install dracut
wget -O /etc/dracut.conf.d/myflags.conf https://github.com/jeblair/x1fold/dracut-flags.conf
mkdir /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/99local
wget -O /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/99local/module-setup.sh https://github.com/jeblair/x1fold/dracut-module-setup.sh
chmod a+x /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/99local/module-setup.sh
This configuration tells dracut to use the bluetooth module and start dbus early (before the prompt to enter the LUKS passphrase. Dracut will automatically include the bluetooth pairing configuration since the keyboard is already paired.
Finally, run dracut and force it to overwrite the existing initrd:
dracut --force
If something goes wrong, you should be able to use grub to edit the command line and use the backup initrd.
During boot, it may take a couple of seconds for the keyboard to establish communication with the computer. Happily, the keyboard will buffer many keystrokes during that time, so you may be able to start entering your LUKS passphrase during this process.