Lenovo X200 Owner's Thread

[nate_2001]

Like most things, the VGA out works and it does not work. It is not 'hotplug'-able, but it will work when properly configured. I haven't gotten cloned monitors up yet using xrandr, but I think it will be possible once I further configure the xorg.conf file. I have not had much trouble getting the external monitor to work without the laptop monitor working. But it's one or the other, so not useful for giving presentations.

Like I said, I fully expect this to work fully once I learn to configure it better.

[TheCan]

Thanks a lot for the information nate_2001! Did you buy your X200 together with the Ultrabase? My primary interest is whether the Displayport Connector works with an DVI-Adapter to connect an external display with reasonable signal quality.

What kind of Monitor did you attach to the VGA output? And did you notice any signs of a bad signal quality? I am planning to attach the X200 to a 26" TFT with WUXGA (1920x1200) that's why signal quality would be really important for me.

And you are running 8.04, not Intrepid? I wouldnt recommend trying Intrepid right now since the current Alpha might permanently damage your network controller. (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/263555)

Could you post the output of "randr" once your external monitor is attached? There is a good randr Howto in the German Ubuntuusers.de-Wiki about how to get it to work: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/RandR

It also links to three english articles on this topic, hope that helps you.

[nate_2001]

I don't have the base, this was through the VGA out on the machine. I connected it to an acer 22" widescreen LCD. It seemed like the quality was fine, but I still have to fine tune it. When I get home tonight, I'll try to find time to work it out and post my xrandr output.

[simon.sigre]

Hey guys; how awsome are these boxes?? Well other than the fact that the HDD accelerator (flash cache) isnt supported, GB-ETH dosent work and finger print reader do-sent seem to be supported by any of the standard packages.

End Rant; hey whats the deal with the usb port on the right hand side? Ibex dosent appear to pick up anything plugged into it.. yet on the left hand side, not probs.. argh!

Have you guys tried compiling the intel video drivers for X from source? they actually work pretty well; other than that.. this laptop is driving me crazy..

[arnstein]

I own a Lenovo X200, and I'm running Intrepid.

From what I see, there's very little documentation available about this combination, so sharing my little pieces of advice.

1. Intrepid does not recognize that the machine can suspend, so pm-suspend by default etc, does not do anything. Currently this can be overcome by adding creating a file in /etc/pm/config.d/ with the contents
SLEEP_MODULE=kernel
This bug is not an exclusive X200 bug.

2. Once this is done, the X200 suspends, but does not restore properly. I tried all sorts of quirks with pm-suspend, but nothing works. Finally, I changed my Xorg driver to "vesa", and now suspend works beautifully. (Sigh, I lose compiz though.) I still haven't found any bug report against this, probably because of the confusion caused by the first bug.

Everything else works beautifully, and almost out of the box. (The GigE ethernet is of course currently disabled, if you've been following the news: there's a bug in the e1000e driver which can permanently damage your ethernet card.)

[fowlstar]

In response to an earlier post about the x200 integrated webcam, I too had problems with cheese/luvcview/skype all causing gnome to freeze up after showing a black box and then a full black screen. I couldn't ctrl+alt+backspace to reset X, so I had to hard reset each time. I figured out that the x200 integrated webcam is uvc-friendly (lsmod |grep uvc).

I also ran into the same problem of having to resort to hard resets while viewing videos (.avi files).

After a bit of experimentation, I tried these three sites (in the order listed below; the last site I had previously installed the drivers for, uninstalled them, and then re-installed them again):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=593231
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-793513.html
http://melchiorre.wordpress.com/2008...0-deb-package/

...and must have done a hard-reset one-time too many (I'm new to Ubuntu and Linux), because the next time I booted up, cheese and luvcview worked fine, though skype would just shut itself down as soon as I used the "test" option for the webcam.

As for the video playback, upgrading to the new intel drivers did the trick.

[me13221]

I don't know what it is I did wrong, but maybe you guys can help me. Apparently Intrepid is supposed to "just work" on the X200, but for me it's more like "just doesn't work." I just did a fresh install to disk from the 20081004 daily-live build and have the following issues. I'd appreciate any help in resolving them:

- Screen resolution is wrong. I added a 1280x800 Mode to xorg.conf but it comes up screwy--- the "bottom" gnome panel is offset from the bottom of the screen by about 40 pixels, and the screen appears to run off the right-hand edge of the display by an unknown number of pixels. This problem is evident both in the gdm login screen and on the gnome desktop. It *is* a 1280x800 screen, right? That's what lenovo says...

- wifi card is not detected. ath5k and ath_pci are loaded but don't do anything.

- (of course, e1000e is disabled so I'm kinda screwed)

- VT console font is too large (also probably a screen resolution thing). when I added vga=791 to the grub menu.lst I lost virtual terminals completely.

And forget about the acpi, webcam, etc. I don't dare to even test those at this point.

I'd appreciate any recommendations.

[me13221]

A few updates:

- Screen resolution is wrong. I added a 1280x800 Mode to xorg.conf but it comes up screwy--- the "bottom" gnome panel is offset from the bottom of the screen by about 40 pixels, and the screen appears to run off the right-hand edge of the display by an unknown number of pixels. This problem is evident both in the gdm login screen and on the gnome desktop. It *is* a 1280x800 screen, right? That's what lenovo says...

So I took a screenshot from GIMP and the size of the resulting image was 1360x800. wtf? The image shows the weird floating bottom-panel.

http://301south.net/wrong-size-desktop.png

FWIW, here's my xorg.conf file:


Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x800" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

- wifi card is not detected. ath5k and ath_pci are loaded but don't do anything.

In 'dmesg | grep ath' I get the following:

[...
[ 12.240069] ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 12.241111] ath_hal: 0.9.18.0 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
[ 12.281171] wlan: 0.9.4
[ 12.287699] ath_pci: 0.9.4
[ 12.287740] ath_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 12.287751] ath_pci 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 12.336429] wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware revision not supported' (HAL status 13)
[ 12.336447] ath_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
...
[ 12.610268] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[ 12.610277] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 12.610290] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 12.610316] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: registered as 'phy0'
[ 12.620339] ath5k phy0: failed to wakeup the MAC Chip
[ 12.620360] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
[ 12.620366] ath5k_pci: probe of 0000:03:00.0 failed with error -5
...

- VT console font is too large (also probably a screen resolution thing). when I added vga=791 to the grub menu.lst I lost virtual terminals completely.

I "fixed" this by switching back to vga=normal, and set about trying to select the font with /etc/default/console-setup. however, I have not found any fonts that give me more than 80 columns, which is disappointing.

[arnstein]

I don't know what it is I did wrong, but maybe you guys can help me. Apparently Intrepid is supposed to "just work" on the X200, but for me it's more like "just doesn't work." I just did a fresh install to disk from the 20081004 daily-live build and have the following issues. I'd appreciate any help in resolving them:

- Screen resolution is wrong. I added a 1280x800 Mode to xorg.conf but it comes up screwy--- the "bottom" gnome panel is offset from the bottom of the screen by about 40 pixels, and the screen appears to run off the right-hand edge of the display by an unknown number of pixels. This problem is evident both in the gdm login screen and on the gnome desktop. It *is* a 1280x800 screen, right? That's what lenovo says...

Change the driver to "vesa", everything works. However compiz will not work. But you'll need "vesa" for suspend to work without crashing.

If you really want to use compiz, and not care about suspend, then a workaround would be specify 1280x800 in xorg.conf, and then set the resolution as 1280x800 in the gnome screen-resolution applet.

- wifi card is not detected. ath5k and ath_pci are loaded but don't do anything.

Hmm, can't help here, I have the Intel wireless which works out of the box.

- (of course, e1000e is disabled so I'm kinda screwed)

apparently this has been fixed. I might wait a while before trying it

And forget about the acpi, webcam, etc. I don't dare to even test those at this point.

I'd appreciate any recommendations.

webcam works. You'll notice that your fan always runs at full speed. (The speed increases from 0, but never decreases.) Suspending and resuming brings the fan back to 0, so another reason to use the vesa driver.

[cleverselfreferentialname]

The suspend to ram (hibernation) thing works if you configure it in
system >> preferences >> power management.

I can close the lid, or use the power button to put my x200 into hibernation mode. This is with the AMD64 OS.

I, too am getting about 5.5 hours from a 9-cell battery that got 7 hours in Vista 64-bit. The fan runs all the time on both AC and battery, just slower on battery.

I hate Vista and feel that 1.5 hours of battery life is a fair trade to rid myself of that pox on human kind.

Heh, see the package laptop-mode-tools and see if anything in there is helpful. Report back for all our benefits.

EDIT: see the output of 'dpkg -L laptop-mode-tools' and start inspecting the tools. Things can be done to reduce heat/increase battery life. hdparm can be used to mess with the frequency with which disk spins up, but I haven't run ubuntu for so long, I don't know if the defaults are sane yet. (I run Debian on a desktop.)

ANOTHER EDIT: If/when SSDs become standard, we won't have to worry about disk stuff.

I have a question for you all. How do I change the amount of shared video ram? I have 4 gb and want to send the max to the video card.

Thanks..............

IIRC it maxes out at 768 and takes it at will, but I really have no idea for sure. If you're using the vesa driver it's probably not being used much.