I just bought a new laptop. After years with netbooks (first the
I finally decided for the
This post features a short review and some hints on configuring the X240 withXubuntu.
The Specs
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12.5“ IPS display (no touch)
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1920×1200 full HD resoulution
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Intel® Core™ i7-4600U CPU 2.10GHz
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512
GB Samsung SSD -
8GB RAM
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no 3G module (available in other models)
Here's what lspci says:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT DRAM Controller (rev 0b) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b) 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 0a0c (rev 0b) 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP USB xHCI HC (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HECI #0 (rev 04) 00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HECI KT (rev 04) 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I218-LM (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev e4) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev e4) 00:1d.0 USB controHeadlineller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP USB EHCI #1 (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP SMBus Controller (rev 04) 02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5227 (rev 01) 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 83)
Photos
Hardware Review
So far I like the laptop a lot, though I still need to get used to the much biggersize
The
The
One thing I found weird is how Lenovo treats the
The
The clickpad is weird. It's a multitouch
The
The X240 comes with an interesting concept regarding
With the 6 cell battery the whole
The
Not hardware related, but still worth mentioning is that there is no
Verdict: a nearly perfect system with only minor nitpicks.
Xubuntu 13.10 Setup
Xubuntu is still my system of choice for laptops. Since Lenovo is partnering with Ubuntu, hardware support is quite good out of the box and the default install works without problems. I opted for encrypting my home partition in the installer - the system should be powerful enough to handle the slight performance overhead.
Nearly everything (volume controls and sound, WiFi, camera, SD-card reader, etc) works out of the box after install. However as always, some things need to be tweaked…
Brightness Controls
Turning up and down the screen brightness with FN+F5 and FN+F6 did not work correctly out of the box. It basically did nothing for a few keypresses and then dimmed the display to barely visible. This /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
Then run sudo update-grub
Power Management
Instead of relying on Ubuntu's standard power management I decided to installTLP.
First I disabled Ubuntu's power governor:
sudo update-rc.d -f ondemand remove
then installed the tool and dependencies:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install tlp tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-tools
TLP is well working without any configuration, but I changed a few things in its config anyway.
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/etc/default/tlp
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CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_AC=ondemand CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_BAT=ondemand CPU_BOOST_ON_AC=1 CPU_BOOST_ON_BAT=0 SATA_LINKPWR_ON_BAT=medium_power
These might be the defaults and commenting them in might be unnecessary. I'm not sure. The last option is a recommendation for some ThinkPads and might not be needed for the X240, but it won't hurt.
Touchpad
To make the touchpad work as I like it, I started with this
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/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
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# Synaptics Touchpad configuration for Thinkpad X240 Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad catchall" Driver "synaptics" MatchIsTouchpad "on" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
# buttons by multi-touch taps Option "TapButton1" "1" # left click with one finger tap Option "TapButton2" "2" # middle click with two finger tap Option "TapButton3" "3" # right click with three finger tap # bottom right corner tap is right click Option "RBCornerButton" "3" # scroll with two fingers only Option "VertEdgeScroll" "off" Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "on" Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "off" Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "on" Option "CircularScrolling" "off" # locked drags Option "LockedDrags" "1" Option "LockedDragTimeout" "500" # top row click areas Option "ClickPad" "true" Option "SoftButtonAreas" "60% 0 0 5% 40% 60% 0 5%" Option "AreaTopEdge" "4%" EndSection # avoid interferences from other drivers Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad ignore duplicates" MatchIsTouchpad "on" MatchOS "Linux" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/mouse*" Option "Ignore" "on" EndSection
This keeps the standard acceleration settings which are quite fast but
I use the easier two-finger tap for middle mouse button, because I need this much more often than a right click (pasting, opening links in new tab, closing tabs, etc.). As a shortcut, a tap in the lower right corner also works as right mouse button.
I exclusively scroll with two finger gestures and disabled all other ways.
In another blog post I learned about
The last lines finally enable the standard clicking behaviour of the clickpad.
As an additional tweak you might want to make double clicks a bit easier by extending the allowed time and movement in XFCE's setting manger: “Settings Manager” → “Mouse and Touchpad” → “Behavior”. A time of 400ms and distance of 8px seem to work fine for me.
Window Managing
All the default XFCE themes use very thin window borders. To resize a window you need to grab the corner of the lower right window. Depending on the theme this might be a 1 by 1 pixel area – extremely annoying to target with just a trackpad.
So I configured a few keyboard shortcuts for the XFCE window manger to ease manual window managing. To do so, go to the Application menu and pick “Settings Manager” → “Window Manager” → “Keyboard”. Here are the shortcuts I set:
The key is the otherwise pretty useless Windows key of course.
Keyboard Config
One thing I found extremely annoying about the keyboard layout is the position of the Home
End
FN+End
PgUp
PgDown
Extremely helpful in figuring out how to do that was this
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~/.Xmodmap
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keycode 112 = Home Home Prior keycode 117 = End End Next
Pressing Ctrl with one of the keys will make them work as standard paging buttons, otherwise they default to Home and End.
To automatically load the keymap in XFCE I referred to this
/bin/bash -c "sleep 20; /usr/bin/xmodmap /home/$USER/.Xmodmap"
Fingerprint Sensor
I haven't really tried to get this working. If you have a description, let me know in the comments please.