Lenovo ThinkPad X230

Lenovo ThinkPad X230 official page, datasheet, hardware maintenance manual, ThinkWiki. PCB schematic has been leaked too.

Configuration

Kernel

Enable Intel kernel mode setting driver:

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

MODULES="i915"

After saving the above files, make sure to regenerate your initram image by the command mkinitcpio -p linux, and follow the steps in kernel parameters.

Screen

X230 has IPS or TN screen with 125.37 DPI. Refer to HiDPI page for more information. It can be set with command xrandr --dpi 125.37 using .xinitrc, .xsession or other autostarts.

Brightness

If you experience that your brightness setting is not restored on resume from suspend, then create config:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Suspend to ram

There is an issue with system shutdown with power saving tools that cannot distinguish sys devices. You will need to add to the systemd shutdown trigger on this machine or else you'll get a system reboot when you shutdown the machine. Put this in /etc/rc.local.shutdown and update and enable its service, if not already.

/etc/rc.local.shutdown

#!/bin/bash
# /etc/rc.local.shutdown: Local shutdown script.
# A script to act as a workaround for the bug in the runtime power management module, which causes thinkpad laptops to restart after shutting down. 
# Bus list for the runtime power management module.
buslist="pci i2c usb"
for bus in $buslist; do                                                             
  for i in /sys/bus/$bus/devices/*/power/control; do                              
    echo on > $i
  done
done

/usr/lib/systemd/system/rc-local-shutdown.service

[Unit]
Description=/etc/rc.local.shutdown Compatibility
ConditionFileIsExecutable=/etc/rc.local.shutdown
DefaultDependencies=no
After=rc-local.service basic.target
Before=shutdown.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/etc/rc.local.shutdown
StandardInput=tty
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=shutdown.target

UMTS Modem

Main article: ThinkPad mobile Internet

Warning: Official UEFI comes with whitelist of PCI boards (e.g. Wi-Fi and UMTS miniPCI cards). After installing unapproved PCI device boot will be interrupted with error:

1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card (0AF0/7201). System is halted.

Some models come with an integrated USB UMTS modem.

$ lsusb -d 0bdb:1926

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0bdb:1926 Ericsson Business Mobile Networks BV H5321 gw Mobile Broadband Driver

In order for it to work with NetworkManager, you will need to install ModemManager from the official repositories.

For it to be recognized by ModemManager, you also need to set the kernel module option to:

/etc/modprobe.d/umts-modem.conf

options cdc_ncm prefer_mbim=N

Input devices

TrackPoint

Main article: TrackPoint

Laptop equipped with combined pointing device called UltraNav™. It incorporates small touchpad, three hardware buttons and TrackPoint.

Touchpad

Note: Touchpad Synaptics superseded by libinput.

The original configuration renders the touchpad quite useless, as it behaves very jumpily. Ubuntu Bugtracker offers a solution for this issue. Add the following:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        # MatchTag "lenovo_x230_all"
        Driver "synaptics"
        # fix touchpad resolution
        Option "VertResolution" "100"
        Option "HorizResolution" "65"
        # disable synaptics driver pointer acceleration
        Option "MinSpeed" "1"
        Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
        # tweak the X-server pointer acceleration
        Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
        Option "AdaptiveDeceleration" "16"
        Option "ConstantDeceleration" "16"
        Option "VelocityScale" "20"
        Option "AccelerationNumerator" "30"
        Option "AccelerationDenominator" "10"
        Option "AccelerationThreshold" "10"
	# Disable two fingers right mouse click
	Option "TapButton2" "0"
        Option "HorizHysteresis" "100"
        Option "VertHysteresis" "100"
        # fix touchpad scroll speed
        Option "VertScrollDelta" "500"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "500"
EndSection

Setting e.g. the motion-acceleration value in dconf to 2.8 works nicely.

Keyboard backlight control keys

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Working out of the box now? (Discuss in Talk:Lenovo ThinkPad X230#)

Note: On most X230 models, backlight works by default without any issues. Use below only in case of any problems.

Due to an issue with the firmware of several ThinkPads the backlight control keys (Fn + F8/F9 on the X230) sometimes don't work correctly. Setting the brightness via e.g. the GNOME power control panel or altering the brightness value in sysfs is possible. The issue can be temporarily and partially fixed in adding the acpi_osi="!Windows 2012" kernel parameter. The fix is partial in that only 8 steps are accessible via the keys. See [1] for details.

Power saving kernel parameters in addition to graphics card power saving, are shown below. acpi_backlight=vendor loads the vendor specific Backlight#ACPI driver (i.e. thinkpad_acpi) so the brightness keys (Fn + F8 and Fn + F9) work correctly.

Note that the acpi_backlight=vendor kernel option also works with the standard Arch kernel (currently 3.7.10-1) and has the additional bonus that (Fn+Space) controls the keyboard lighting.

Sound control buttons

Note: Laptop has single TRRS CTIA/Apple 3.5 mm audio jack (sleeve for a microphone).

Red LED mute indicators light up automatically, if corresponding channel muted in alsamixer. Easiest way to make buttons work is to install PulseAudio and it's plugin for your desktop environment.

GNOME - works out of the box
Xfce - install pulseaudio xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, add plugin to panel and reboot. Additionally xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin uses pavucontrol as mixer and xfce4-notifyd for sound level popups
Handle ACPI events with acpid the hard way. Some functions like thinkpad-mutemic implemented in thinkpad-scripts^AUR
See also ThinkPad: Mute button

Fingerprint reader

Supported by fprint out of the box. Used with PAM for authentication, eliminating necessity of password input (logon, sudo). Though it's impossible to turn laptop on and boot Arch right into a desktop environment by just one finger swipe.

X230T (tablet version)

Wacom tablet input

Works out of the box with xf86-input-wacom. See Wacom tablet.

Multitouch screen for the X230t

Some X230t models have a multitouch screen in addition to the Wacom tablet. Works out of the box with xf86-input-libinput.

OpenCL

Thinkpad X230 based on Intel Ivy Bridge (3rd generation) platform which meets OpenCL 1.2 specification. Unfortunately GPU support in Linux is broken, so beignet^AUR and intel-opencl^AUR won't work. Use CPU-only intel-opencl-runtime^AUR instead.

OpenCL computation performance differ between CPU and GPU, depending on task. In many cases GPU is preferable. For Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU, which incorporates HD Graphics 4000 GPU:

GPU hashcat -m2500 -b -D 2 --force reports 3095 H/s (checked in Windows)
CPU hashcat -m2500 -b -D 1 reports only 2660 H/s, which is the same as no-OpenCL aircrack-ng -S

In this example OpenCL don't give any advantage and better look for other options like building native binary for your system.

Power Saving

Main article: Power saving

TLP

Users of TLP need to pay attention to a hardware bug according to which it is recommended to only use either the upper or lower charging threshold. The following configuration is recommended by the developer of TLP.[2]

/etc/tlp.conf

START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=67
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=100

Charge thresholds

In order to prolong battery lifespan, especially if laptop always connected to AC power supply, it's possible to keep battery charge between 40-80 %. You can use tpacpi-bat (written in Perl) for setting charge thresholds. This tool was superseded by natacpi, which included in kernel 4.17 and supported by TLP. Though it's possible to change thresholds directly. Values will be stored in battery microcontroller and will survive reboot, but reset if you remove the battery.

# echo 40 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_start_threshold
# echo 80 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_stop_threshold

Fan control

To optimize fan control, install and setup thinkfan. Then use the following configuration:

/etc/thinkfan.conf

sensors:
  - hwmon: /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
fans:
  - tpacpi: /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
levels:
  - [0, 0, 60]
  - [1, 53, 65]
  - [2, 55, 66]
  - [3, 57, 68]
  - [4, 61, 70]
  - [5, 64, 71]
  - [7, 68, 32767]

You might want to add

 - ["level full-speed", 68, 32767]

It drives the fan at full speed which is normally not possible. It enables the x230 to run in turbo-boost for extended periods of time.

UEFI

Laptop incorporates InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS with classic text interface. It supports UEFI with Secure Boot, UEFI-CSM and Legacy BIOS modes.

Boot configuration

UEFI boot options can be safely (no bricking) set with efibootmgr or UEFI Shell v2 (checked with BIOS 2.77 (G2ETB7WW) EC 1.15). Though you can delete any boot variable, so be careful!

X230 in UEFI-non-CSM mode installed with EFISTUB on SSD disk boots into display manager in less than 25 seconds. Small ESP (100 MiB fat32) also supported.

USB UEFI update

Tip: There are unofficial firmware available, such as Coreboot or Heads in order to remove hardware whitelists and provide trusted boot.

All official updates, including Windows utility, Bootable CD and documentation can be found here. You can use geteltorito^AUR to create bootable USB images from the Bootable CD:

$ geteltorito.pl g2uj24us.iso > update.img 
# dd bs=512K if=update.img of=/dev/sdX

Insert USB stick, reboot and press F12, choose your USB. Follow the instructions.

Trusted Platform Module

Laptop has dedicated TPM 1.2 chip onboard[3][4]. It doesn't looks like it can be upgraded to TPM 2.0. Chip itself disabled by default sometimes, also owner clearing won't appear without Supervisor password set:

Enter Thinkpad UEFI Setup by pressing F1
Set Security > Password > Supervisor password
Set Security > Security Chip > Security Chip [Active]
Save settings by pressing F10 and reboot
Turn laptop off, turn on and UEFI option Security > Security Chip > Clear Security Chip eventually will appear.

Process described in "ThinkPad X230 and X230i User Guide", Chapter 4. Security > Setting the security chip.

Known issues

There is a BIOS bug that gets in the way of the boot process with LUKS and full-disk encryption. The user is stuck at the "Loading initial ramdisk" step, and does not see a password prompt to unlock the encrypted device. You can actually enter your password at this step, and boot-up will continue. However, updating the BIOS will resolve this completely.
UEFI option to clear TPM not working. STM chip datasheet describes physical presence pin, which, probably, can be used as workaround.