Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 2nd Gen with Ubuntu 14.04

[cheflo]

UPDATES

-Added how to enable upper mouse buttons
- Unfortunately, the two issues below are present in 14.10 as well, both without and with the intel graphics installer(1.08). However, they are significantly rarer and I am using 14.10 happily.
- Upon opening the lid, the screen is sometimes frozen after the laptop has been closed (suspended) for a while. This usually fixes itself after a few seconds and I get redirected to the log in prompt, but once I had to kill X.
- The screen is definitely iffy after suspend. Not necessarily the touch input, but there are graphical glitches and scrolling becomes laggy. I will test with 14.10 and the latest intel drivers when I have more time.

Original Post
Hi everyone,

I thought I would start a thread where we can share tips and tricks on what makes Linux run smoothly on the 12.5" TP Yoga 2nd gen. I installed Ubuntu 14.04 Unity desktop on mine yesterday and it has been running great so far. Below you can take part of what is working (almost everything) and what is not (almost nothing) =). Many of the tips and scripts I include here are from this guy and the previous discussion on running Linux on the first generation TP Yoga and only include minor modifications of my own so credit goes to the original authors. I got the TP Yoga with 8gb of ram, i5, 256GB SSD (samsung evo, upgraded myself, it's easy), 1080p multitouch screen with active digitizer.

Pen

• I like the feel, it is a little small, but miles ahead of the one that came with the Asus Vivotab note8.
• Button = right click (configurable in settings as top button)
• Pressure Sensitivity
  
  • Works out of the box in Krita, which also seems to have some sort of in build palm rejection. Guide to calibration if needed
  • In Gimp, Edit > Input Devices > Change the wacom device from 'Disabled' to 'Screen'.
  • I got the best results by setting the tip feel as a little bit firmer in the wacom systems settings

Fn Keys

• Works:
  
  • FnLock
  • VolMute/Mute/VolUp/VolDown/MicMute
  • BrightUp/BrightDown
  • Wifi
  • Home/End/Insert
  • Fn+Space for keyboard backlight
  
  
• Doesn't work (xev output in parenthesis):
  
  • Projector key (expose event?)
  • Settings (keycode 179)
  • Search (lots of zeros)
  • Task switcher (keycode 128)
  • App menu (keycode 165)

Webcam and mic

• Works out of the box in Skype and cheese.

Touchscreen

• Some gestures work out of the box. I read that unity does not play nicely with touchegg, so didn't investigate this further.
  
  • Even though the default ubuntu gestures are somewhat lacking, Google Chrome has great support for gestures which pretty much save the day. In chrome://flags - Enable Touch events > automatic, Enable Pinch Scale > Enabled, Enable touch based editing > Default
  
  
• Once it died after suspend, have tried some solution online to get it back but no luck.
  
  • Originally 'SYNAPTICS Synaptics Touch Digitizer V04' in xinput list. Entry disappears after suspend.
  • However, this only happened once and now it works perfectly after waking up.
  
  
• There seems to be some random graphics issues occurring, like having some letters disappear in titlebars and filenames. It is not very severe and goes away when rescaling the text in Display Options
• There is a patch suggested in this discussion, but it did not download when I updated my system and the newest intel installation tool seems not to be available for 14.04 (at least not 14.04.2).

Touchpad

• One finger = left click (button 1), two finger = right click (button 3), three or more fingers = nothing (not registered by xev)
• Clickpad click = left click, clickpad click close to bottom right corner = right click
• Upper Buttons
  
  • Left = button 4 (unfortunately the same as two finger scroll up)
  • Right = button 5 (unfortunately the same as two finger scroll down)
  • Middle = not registered by xev and omdifying 50-synaptics.conf has no effect
  • This lack of button features is related to bugs/lack of functionality in the kernel for the new hardware lenovo chose to implement. There is a patch to be committed to 4.0 (and maybe backported?)
  • If you want the buttons to work as left, middle, right and are ready to lose two finger scrolling/clicking and some touchpad sensitivity, then you can do the below (from here)

modprobe -r psmouse

modprobe psmouse proto=imps

To make this change permanent, create a file such as touchpad.conf under /etc/modprobe.d/, and put the following line in it:

options psmouse proto=imps

• If you want to disable areas of the trackpad, copy /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf and name it 60-synaptics.conf to have higher precedence. Then add the following two lines

  Option "AreaTopEdge" "30%"
  Option "AreaBottomEdge" "80%"

  so that the second last section of the file reads
  

  # This option enables the bottom right corner to be a right button on clickpads
  # and the right and middle top areas to be right / middle buttons on clickpads
  # with a top button area.
  # This option is only interpreted by clickpads.
  Section "InputClass"
          Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
          MatchDriver "synaptics"
          Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
          Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
      Option "AreaTopEdge" "30%"
      Option "AreaBottomEdge" "80%"
  EndSection

  That disables to top 30 % and bottom 20 % for me.

Spin

• This is a cool python utility written by an owner of the first gen yoga and linked in the thread mentioned above. You can download it from GitHub. You will need to make a small change.
  
  • The touchscreen name is now 'SYNAPTICS Synaptics Touch Digitizer V04' instead of 'ELAN Touchscreen'. Search and replace accordingly.
  • Most things seems to work great here, but I was having some problem with windows not filling up the screen when rotated vertically. I will need to test this more.

Additional comments

• If you opt to use any of the other rotation scripts from the 1st gen TPYoga thread, note that you need to change

  current_orientation(){xrandr|grep " connected" |awk '{print $4}'}

  to

  current_orientation(){xrandr --verbose|grep eDP1|awk '{print $6}'}

  and remove a left parenthesis from the first 'normal' a few lines after that.

• It's annoying that insert is the default behaviour of the End key under FnLock. Add

  sleep 2 && setxkbmap us -option  caps:ctrl_modifier && xmodmap -e "keycode 118 = End" && xmodmap -e "keycode 115 = Insert"

  to the start up scripts and without the sleep command to a custom keyboard shortcut for when waking from suspend etc.

• Double mouse icons after rotating the screen (only for a while)
• Arrow keys feel a bit small
• Wifi works after suspend!! =D (unfortunately not that great in 14.10, need to turn it on and off some times)
• Keyboard feels great!
• Battery life was a bit disappointing during the first day (around 4 hours), but today it seems to be at least 5. I need to experiment more with brightness settings as this computer gets pretty bright which draws a lot of juice.

Overall I am very happy with my new laptop! It is so much more portable than my last (17", hehe) and the screen folding with pen input helps a lot when reading articles and taking notes. I still have to test note taking with onenote under virtualbox/vmware, but I have a lot of work to do this week so future updates might take a while. Looking forward to input from other TP Yoga owners with their experience in running Linux on this machine.

[cheflo]

So the only major issues so far are with the screen after suspend. There are graphic glitches, laggy scrolling and missing characters (the latter actually not only after suspend and not yet with 14.10+intel updater). These issues are present in Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 even with the intel graphics updater. I have only tried the Unity desktop so far, is it time to venture into alternative desktop environments/linux flavors or does anyone have any suggestion to what I can do to remedy these problems?

[ZICODIAN]

Hey

I've updated spin by adding a little procedure to get the appropriate input device names, so it should work with both the ThinkPad S1 and S120 Yogas without modification now.

https://github.com/wdbm/spin

[cheflo]

sweet thanks!

btw, can I ask you what desktop environment you are using. are you having similar issues as I am?

[cheflo]

After a couple of weeks with the yoga, I am extremely happy with my purchase!

Especially since a reddit user made me look into how to extend the battery life of this laptop:

Without any tweaks, I used to have an estimated battery life of 5-6 h and a wattage usage of about 7-8 W... . This is with brightness level 3 (using brightness indicator) and reading articles in chrome while having my gmail open.

After tweaking, I now have and whopping 7+ h of estimated battery and use only 5-6 W in the same scenario as above! Of course, this method of measuring is not directly rigorous, but I tried to keep usage scenario as similar as possible and my laptop definitely has longer battery life estimates now.

So what did I do? Well, barely nothing. Initially, battery tweaks were slightly confusing as there is multiple utilities for this, including jupiter, laptop-mode-tools, pm-utils and tlk. After reading all over the place, what I took away from it was this (please correct me if I am wrong): The kernel what updated a few years ago with powersaving settings for laptops but these are not enabled automatically. Therefore, laptop-mode-tools was initially needed to enable these settings. Then there is also jupiter, which enabled additional power saving features. Later, pm-utils was added and most of jupiter's settings were now enabled by default (and jupiter has since been discontinued), but configuration is spread out in a few scripts and the defaults are not as aggressive as they could be. Now there is tlp, which has more efficient default settings and any additional configuration can be done from a single script instead of several different. You can see the difference in powertop, both in the lower wattage and the amount of tunables that have been changed from 'bad' to 'good' (there are a few extra that can be toggled, i didn't try them). The only default setting that I read was somewhat questionable is low power sata mode, which could cause data corruption in the odd case, I'm still using it for now. TL;DR install tlp and enjoy (tlp tlp-rdw, and thinkpad specific: tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms [tp-smapi will show as inactive, which seems to be the case of all new thinkpad as per the tlp faq])

The same user on reddit also pointed me towards a set of scripts for automatic rotation of the screen using the accelerometer, but I haven't tried them out yet. Lastly, I do not have as severe screen issues as before, just garbled text that can be fixed on zooming in/out, no stuttering.

[ZICODIAN]

Hey there! Thanks for all of the details on the power efficiency. I'll take a look at the details on it, but what you've got looks good.

I've updated [spin](https://github.com/wdbm/spin), fixing the touchpad switch and adding nipple/touchpad orientation control.

Thanks also for mentioning the experiments concerning the accelerometer. I'll take a look.

[xt-gr79]

@cheflo Thanks for sharing all these. I own a yoga S1 and I've noticed that the power consumption is much bigger in ubuntu and manjaro KDE than in windows. In addition the fan is working more time. Do all these apply to S1 as well? Could you please briefly write down the steps you followed to reduce power cosumption (it was not clear to me from your post)?

[ZICODIAN]

Hi *

I have added acceleration control to spin. https://github.com/wdbm/spin

[xt-gr79]

Has anybody tried this on thinkpad yoga S1? Is it worth trying?

[ragtag]

I got the ThinkPad Yoga a few days ago, and have installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it, but am having some issues with it.

Firstly, changing rotation or resolution, logs me out almost every time. This is the same if I use the options in the System Settings, or the spin.py script. It will rotate/change resolution, and then almost instantly revert back to what it had before, but messed up, and then log me out. The log output looks like this.

Aug 21 00:46:14 yoga mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 9 was not an MTP device
Aug 21 00:46:21 yoga gnome-session[3755]: WARNING: Application 'compiz.desktop' killed by signal 11
Aug 21 00:46:21 yoga gnome-session[3755]: WARNING: App 'compiz.desktop' respawning too quickly
Aug 21 00:46:21 yoga gnome-session[3755]: CRITICAL: We failed, but the fail whale is dead. Sorry....

The same thing happens with a fresh user, and when booted from the Lived CD.

The second problem I'm having is that pressure is not very accurate. In both Gimp and MyPaint, it leaves blotches. This is most noticeable with an ink pen. I tried with my old tablet pen too, and got the same result. Plus, you have to apply quite a bit of pressure before it registers at all, which is kind of annoying (more than on my old tablet, and way more than on a Cintiq).

I'm almost tempted to 'dd' back the image I took of the Windows install it came with for comparison, just to rule out hardware problems. I didn't really test it much in Windows, before replacing it with Linux.

p.s. And does anyone have two finger scrolling working on the touch screen. Would be nice to have when in tablet mode.