Natty Narwhal on Lenovo ThinkPad X220T

[unclepedro]

I just got a ThinkPad X220T in the mail yesterday -- Lenovo's brand new convertible tablet offering. Since this is new hardware with some special characteristics, I thought it might be worthwhile to start a thread for experiences and ideas. Eventually, when this is more fleshed out, I'll write a tutorial.

This is my first new post to UF -- if this isn't the right place for this kind of thread, please let me know and I'll move it.

[unclepedro]

Some pretty reasonable progress so far on the basics. The NN Desktop amd64 iso worked well. Of course, the X220T does not have an optical drive, so I used unetbootin to put the ISO onto a USB thumbdrive. I had to use the F12 boot menu to select the USB device.

I used the basic installer to repartition the disk, shrinking my Windows 7 partition down to 50GB. After repartitioning, the first time you boot Windows, you'll need to run a filesystem check (which Windows will do automatically).

Other than that, the basic installation process proceeds normally and flawlessly. Wifi, network, sound all work out of the box. The pen works, although I think I need to do a little calibration. The finger touching "works" in the sense that the computer is getting the touch signals, but acts extremely weirdly. I'll be looking for a fix for this.

The screen rotation button on the panel does not work by default, although the screen rotation in the Display Settings widget works well enough. (I added the widget to the panel.) However, when the screen is rotated, the pen input seems to be rotated as well (and as I said the finger input is not right). I have hopes that these have already been resolved but haven't tried yet.

So basically, all the non-tablet features work fine; the pen works fine in landscape mode, and (out of the box) finger is "working" but goofy and in rotated mode both are unusable but should be fixable.

I'll report more as I continue to goof around with it.

[unclepedro]

Oh yeah, You'll need to enable the virtualization extensions in the BIOS if you plan to use them in VM software.

[Favux]

Hi unclepedro,

The finger touching "works" in the sense that the computer is getting the touch signals, but acts extremely weirdly. I'll be looking for a fix for this.

That's because while the product ID 0xE6 is in the 2.6.38 kernel's wacom.ko and in xf86-input-wacom-0.10.11's wcmUSB.c it isn't in wcmValidateDevices.c so the driver doesn't realize it is dealing with a tablet PC with 2FGT. That is fixed on 0.11.1. See the Bamboo P&T HOW TO part II. b) to update xf86-input-wacom. That will also get you the cw and ccw rotation fix, so a twofer.

The screen rotation button on the panel does not work by default, although the screen rotation in the Display Settings widget works well enough. (I added the widget to the panel.) However, when the screen is rotated, the pen input seems to be rotated as well (and as I said the finger input is not right). I have hopes that these have already been resolved but haven't tried yet.

You might want to consider Magick Rotation: https://launchpad.net/magick-rotation

[unclepedro]

Cool. When I searched for X220T in the forums I thought I saw a blurb about fixes helping the X220T but I didn't go further since it wasn't a specific "experience report" with the machine. I will check that stuff out tomorrow and report back.

Thanks!

[unclepedro]

So, I followed the steps in II.b of the link posted above (compiling and installing xf86-input-wacom 0.11.1), and installing magick-rotate. (And installing CellWriter as suggested.) I also did an update/upgrade of all packages and rebooted.

Magick-rotate does indeed rotate magically (based on the hinge of course, the X220T does not have screen rotation accelerometers). Very cool.

Unfortunately, the pen/touch issues I was having before persist.

The pen works correctly in landscape mode, but is very confused when rotated, as is rotated touch. Touch in landscape is odd; I can move icons with a single finger, but when I try to move windows, the window "jumps" to the left side of the screen (sometimes resizing) when I let go. I assume this is related to the multitouch issues you mentioned before.

Do you know if this is something I can fix with the xsetwacom scripts (described in step III), or is this possibly some other problem? I'm happy to dig around for answers, but if you know off the top of your head it would be very helpful!

[SaintDanBert]

...
I used the basic installer to repartition the disk, shrinking my Windows 7 partition down to 50GB. After repartitioning, the first time you boot Windows, you'll need to run a filesystem check (which Windows will do automatically).

Did you blow away and re-purpose the as-built "recovery" partition?
Does all of the Lenovo boot stuff continue to work after the Linux install?

...
The screen rotation button on the panel does not work by default, although the screen rotation in the Display Settings widget works well enough. (I added the widget to the panel.) However, when the screen is rotated, the pen input seems to be rotated as well (and as I said the finger input is not right). I have hopes that these have already been resolved but haven't tried yet.

Karl Hegbloom has a PPA with a package tablet-screen-rotation-support that is worth the effort.

The bezel orientation button does not throw an ACPI event -- based on 'acpi-listen' output -- I've heard it needs to be enabled but have not learned how.

So basically, all the non-tablet features work fine; the pen works fine in landscape mode, and (out of the box) finger is "working" but goofy and in rotated mode both are unusable but should be fixable.
...

The Hegbloom package sorts much of this out.