Lenovo ThinkPad X220

Setup

Graphics

The graphic card is supported by the xf86-video-intel driver package from the extra repository. The Xorg server makes use of this automatically. There's no need for a Xorg configuration file.

pacman -S xf86-video-intel

Booting

The X220 cannot boot from a GPT disk with legacy BIOS, so either use an MBR disk or setup UEFI.

Configuration

Heat issues

According to a forum post you should set some power saving options in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf or add them to your kernel line in your menu.lst. We use rc6=7 for deepest sleep mode.

options i915 modeset=1
options i915 i915_enable_rc6=7
options i915 i915_enable_fbc=1 
options i915 lvds_downclock=1

As well you could suffer of Kernel Power Regressions.

My laptop gets stuck in a reboot loop if I resume from suspend! Help!

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

See also

• Arch user blogs about the X220
  • Thinkpad X220 model 4287CTO using a msata SSD for 64 bit Archlinux
  • X220 i5
• Thinkwiki X220 reference
• "Arch By Hand" UEFI GPT SSD LUKS Install Script, built on an x220 tablet with an SSD.
• Power saving options for the X220 - Notebook Review Forum