Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Ubuntu 11.04
This page is a stub for describing the process of installing and configuring Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220.
If you wish to backup the original Windows and Lenovo recovery partitions before installing Ubuntu, there is a guide on Think Wiki.
The current support statuses are based on a 64 bit install.
Overview
Feature
Support status
Installation
Power Management
Display
Input
I/O
Multimedia
(works out-of-the-box)
(works, with remarks)
(needs manual install)
(won't work)
(not yet documented)
Installation
USB Installation
Works out of the box. Press F1 to access BIOS configuration, F12 to access boot device menu.
Network Installation
Works (according to ThinkWiki).
Power Management
Suspend
Works out of the box, including on models with USB 3.0 in 11.10 release.
Hibernate
Works out of the box (using the menu in the upper right corner of the screen).
However, the Fn+F12 keyboard shortcut has been reported not to work (one system hung before reaching hibernation state).
Reboot
Works out of the box.
Battery
Battery is detected and monitor reports correctly out of the box.
CPU Throttling
Works out of box (i7-2620M). Tested with ac (65 watt) and battery using 'stress -m 4' to add load.
Sensors
Works out of the box (i5-2540M), reports HDD speed and proc temp.
Display
Screen
Works out of the box.
Colors
Works out of the box.
3D Acceleration
Works out of the box.
VGA Port
Connecting an external monitor via the VGA port is automatically detected, however only the top bar is rendered and desktoparea and an applications are black. Seems to be a Natty issue than a hardware issue. Haven't investigated yet.
Seems to be this bug.
On 11.10, works out of the box, without bugs, using Awesome WM (not tested using Unity).
On 12.04, works out of the box in Unity.
Display Port
Works out of box (video and sound). Tested with HDMI adapter.
Input
Touchpad
Works out of the box with multitouch support in 11.10. Behavior can be changed in the preferences panel. . Works out of the box with touch to click and edge scrolling. Two finger and horizontal scrolling can be enabled in Mouse settings. Caveats:
- Click and drag only works when the click is made at the very bottom edge of the touchpad.
- Right click does not work
- Mouse is somewhat "shakey" whilst touching the trackpad.
Unity supports the following multitouch actions:
- 1 finger
- tap = primary button click;
- move = move the cursor;
- 2 fingers
- tap = secondary button click;
- move = vertical/horizontal scrolling;
- 3 fingers
- tap = middle button click;
Right click can be fixed by patching the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package with the following these steps (source):
mkdir tmpbuild cd tmpbuild/ wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2 apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-1.3.99+git20110116.0e27ce3a/ cd debian/patches/ tar xfj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2 ls -1 2*.patch >> series cd ../../ sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_1.3.99+git20110116.0e27ce3a-0ubuntu12_amd64.deb
Trackpoint
Works out of the box in 11.10, including scrolling using the center button.
Works out of the box with the following caveat:
- Center button does not enable scrolling
To fix center button scrolling. Install gpointing-device-settings
sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings
To launch, press Alt-F2 and type "gpointing-device-settings".
In the trackpoint section, select “use wheel emulation” and set button to 2.
Keyboard
Key
Support status
Function
Speaker mute
Yes
Volume down
Yes
Volume up
Yes
Mic mute
No
ThinkVantage
Yes
Generates XF86Launch1
Lock (F2)
Yes
Manage battery and power (F3)
Yes
Displays power information
Sleep (F4)
Yes
Manage wireless (F5)
Yes
Toggles wifi and bluetooth
Camera settings (F6)
Yes
Takes a photo in cheese
Display settings (F7)
Not tested
Input device settings (F8)
Yes
Toggles trackpad)
Hibernate (F12)
Yes
Invokes hibernate but hibernate fails
Brightness up
Yes
Brightness down
Yes
Thinklight
Yes
Web browser back and forward
Yes
Multimedia controls
Not tested
Magnify
No
Fingerprint Reader
Works with fingerprint gui
I/O
Ethernet
Works out of the box.
Wireless
Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205/Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
Works out of the box.
Bluetooth
Not tested extensively but seems to work out of the box.
USB
Works out of the box.
USB3
Works out of the box. USB3 devices do not boot laptop.
CardReader
Works out of the box. Tested using a 2 GB SD card and 8 GB class 4 SDHC card.
Integrated mobile broadband
On ThinkPad X220 4291, mobile broadband works out of the box. The mobile broadband module is an Ericsson F5521gw (USB vendor/product ID 0bdb:1911).
Other ThinkPad X220 models have the Gobi 3000 mobile broadband module which has been reported not to work out of the box. However, open source drivers appear to be available.
Webcam
Works out of the box. Tested using Cheese/Skype/GTalk plugin for Firefox.
Sound
Speaker and audio jack work out of the box.
Microphone
Works out of the box.
References
Recent MacBook Pro documentation and the X201 and X220 documentation on ThinkWiki.