Lenovo ThinkPad X1

Model description

Lenovo ThinkPad X1, Sandy Bridge (Core i5, 2,5 GHz), NWG2MRT This model has SSD 80/HDD 320 pair. Comes without optical drive. Has UEFI BIOS with BIOS-legacy fallback mode. Has Windows 7 Pro pre-installed, with tons of bloatware (bing toolbar, big Lenovo superbar button et all) pre-installed, too.

Drive space customization

By default:

- SSD: two WinRE partitions and one Windows system partition
- HDD: blank

I've chosen to:

- leave WinRE untouched (there are two such partitions)
- use SSD for my root partition
- use HDD for swap, /home, /var (~30 Gb, pacman cache goes here), /tmp

Installation method

Note: If you'd like to create Windows recovery flash drive, do it before Arch installation with the help of autorun located at recovery partition, from your installed Windows system.

Due to the fact that there is no optical drive, you need to install Arch from USB stick.

Legacy-BIOS

This procedure is far less involved then UEFI and works perfectly.

In order to turn off UEFI booting you will need to boot into your BIOS and change the boot mode to Legacy. Afterward, follow the Beginner's Guide for standard installation instructions.

UEFI

Installation from UEFI bootable USB works with the default bootloader, so rEFInd is unnecessary. In the BIOS under Startup, set "UEFI/Legacy Boot" to UEFI only. The default partition table (and Windows installation) uses MBR. For UEFI, reformat the disk as GPT.

Booting using an efibootmgr entry works well. The warnings about incompatibility and embedding arguments to do not apply.

Hardware

Almost everything works out of the box. Install synaptics and video-intel drivers.

Fingerprint Reader

fingerprint-gui from the AUR is already patched to work with the X1's newer fingerprint reader. To get the gui's dropdown to recognize your device, you'll have to add your user to the plugdev group:

# gpasswd -a <username> plugdev

It has been seen that the relevant udev rules do not get set properly. To do this, open /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libbsapi.rules with your favorite text editor to add (or create with) the following lines:

/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libbsapi.rules

ATTRS{idVendor}==”147e”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”2020″,   SYMLINK+=”input/touchchip-%k”, MODE=”0664″, GROUP=”plugdev”
ATTRS{idVendor}==”147e”, ATTRS{idProduct}==”2020″,   ATTR{power/control}==”*”, ATTR{power/control}=”auto”

Restart your computer for the group and udev changes to take effect.

Adjusting Backlight Brightness

Add acpi_osi="!Windows 2012" to your kernel parameters (see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=158775).

Power management

Just consult Laptop page to read about tp_smapi, pm-utils, uswsusp and acpid.

Tp_smapi does not seem to work at all.

Suspend works fine, even with status indicator.

Extra Keys

The sleep, wifi, brightness, and keyboard backlight keys all work out of the box. All of the others (volume, media, etc.) can be bound using the standard X labels:

XF86ScreenSaver
XF86WebCam
XF86Display
XF86AudioPrev
XF86AudioPlay
XF86AudioNext
XF86AudioMute
XF86AudioLowerVolume
XF86AudioRaiseVolume
XF86AudioMicMute
XF86Launch1 # the black button above F6