Lenovo ThinkPad X220

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The Lenovo ThinkPad X220 is a small-form-factor laptop with Intel Mobile i5/i7 CPU, and Intel graphics. It has no optical drive. You can see full specs at ThinkWiki.

Setup

Battery

Battery functions like charging thresholds can be controlled using the script tpacpi-bat together with the kernel module acpi_call-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror]. The TLP power saving tool supports using acpi_call as backend for setting the thresholds as well.

Fingerprint reader

The Upek fingerprint reader is supported by Fingerprint-gui.

Graphics

The graphics driver is provided by the xf86-video-intel package from the Official repositories.

Trackpoint and Clickpad

See TrackPoint.

Issues

Boot fails (UEFI/GPT)

The laptop can not boot from a GPT disk in Legacy BIOS mode, it is necessary to either switch to UEFI booting or create a MBR Partition Table.

Additional considerations from ThinkWiki:

  • The X220 cannot/will not boot GPT disks using Legacy BIOS, you must setup UEFI.
  • The X220 will not boot /efi/*/*.efi unless signed(?) into BIOS, you have to copy it to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi.
  • Disabling the BIOS setting USB UEFI BIOS Support disables all USB booting, ie, both UEFI and Legacy BIOS.

Reboot loop after resume from suspend

This can be caused by the EFI storage getting too full. Run the following commands as root to free up some space. 

 # First clear the pstore
 mkdir -p /dev/pstore
 mount -t pstore pstore /dev/pstore
 ls /dev/pstore # <- Nothing important should be here, but check first anyway
 rm /dev/pstore/*

 # Next some EFI variables. These are used/created by pstore, but I've had them even though 
 #I deleted the pstore data using the above commands. YMMV.
 rm /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/dump-type0-*

This information was taken from the Lenovo forums

Microphone

The x220 internal microphone has been the source of many complaints across platforms. Specifically, it can generate a lot of static or hissing on top of any recorded audio. The workaround is to mute the right mic input channel (in audio control programs that allow independent channel setting) or to drag the balance slider in a GUI for the internal mic level fully to the left.

Note also that the audio jack is a combination headset/mic jack and will work with modern smartphone headsets with inline microphones, as an alternative.

Multi-monitor setups with X

Some window managers, such as qtile or awesome don't seem to get along with the sna acceleration method of the intel driver, which results in tiled and broken display of the environments, when using a multi-monitor setup (using internal monitor only, works just fine).

Switching to uxa fixes this [1].

It seems, that this issue does not occur in other desktop environments, such as Xfce, however.

Backlight

Since linux 3.16, some backlight-related kernel parameter defaults have been changed, causing the hardware brightness up/down keys to no longer function automatically. This can be worked around by setting acpi_osi, e.g. 

 acpi_osi="!Windows 2012"

in the kernel parameters. More details can be found on the Backlight page.

See also

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