Linux on the X220

[ThinkRob]

Another annoying problem that I think is Ubuntu (Natty Narwhal) related.. Wireless keeps dropping every couple of minutes and re-connecting (slowly). Very annoying.

It seems as if I'm running Realtek wireless driver rtl8192ce version 2.6. According to realtek's website, 2.6 is for Kernal 2.6.34 and earlier. Isn't Narwhal based off a later kernal?

Realtek

I'm sorry to say, but Realtek's hardware and software is generally complete junk. There's a reason that their drivers tend to stay in staging for a *long* time. Honestly, I think you might be better off just getting an Intel-based card...

Still, rtl8192ce is now in mainline as of 2.6.39, so my advice would be to try the latest mainline kernel. Natty is likely using an older kernel, so the driver there might still be staging-quality...

Oh, and I'd ignore pretty much anything that Realtek says. In my experience their concept of what makes a good Linux driver is "Could one of our devs compile it and run it for a minute? Great! We're done."

Disclaimer: I'm pretty obviously very biased against them. That's due to the pure joy that I've had dealing with their NICs. In the last three years alone I've had a wireless NIC that locked up randomly (as in the hardware simply ceased responding to anything), a desktop NIC that would hard lock the kernel as soon as you sent more than about 100 kbit/s over it, and a second desktop NIC that would simply fail to register a change in plug state. YMMV... I hope it does.

[ecoli]

Did you enable power saving option for wireless adaptor? I have intel 6205 and my wifi becomes unreliable when I do that.

I didn't, but perhaps it got switched on automatically? I found a fix via google, we'll see if it works, but so far so good.

[nomad9]

....
Disclaimer: I'm pretty obviously very biased against them. That's due to the pure joy that I've had dealing with their NICs. In the last three years alone I've had a wireless NIC that locked up randomly (as in the hardware simply ceased responding to anything), a desktop NIC that would hard lock the kernel as soon as you sent more than about 100 kbit/s over it, and a second desktop NIC that would simply fail to register a change in plug state. YMMV... I hope it does.

haha... Back in the days, I too had a pleasure using Realtek NICs as well. It's one of the first things I look at laptops / motherboard / PC I am purchasing. Maybe they're better now, but I can't say for sure. Haven't used it for a long long while.

I didn't, but perhaps it got switched on automatically? I found a fix via google, we'll see if it works, but so far so good.

From my experience, wifi power saving feature is turned off by default on Natty. I turned it on a couple of times and my connectivity went bad.

Glad to know that you got it fixed.

[ThinkRob]

haha... Back in the days, I too had a pleasure using Realtek NICs as well. It's one of the first things I look at laptops / motherboard / PC I am purchasing. Maybe they're better now, but I can't say for sure. Haven't used it for a long long while.

Missing that retro feel? Then you'll be pleased to know that they're every bit as bad as they used to be. Good to know that some things don't change.

[Supermiguel]

is ubuntu the best bet for this system?

[driekus]

Has anyone tried Linux Mint 11 on the X220. I know that it is based on Ubuntu, but the question is whether a lot of the problems with Ubuntu 11.04 have been caused by the Unity/Gnome 3 interface.

[UNIXgod]

is ubuntu the best bet for this system?

Currently it's certified to run on ubuntu. You will need a distro running kernel version 2.6.38 to run it. phronix stated that the sandy bridge has a regression in 2.6.39 which also has usb 3.0 support. Won't be really done until 2.6.40 which is actually going to be 3.0 as linus decided to bump the number out of the 2.x series.

btw I did run ubuntu for about a week while waiting for ram. It worked well. I currently am running Funtoo( Gentoo variant). I may play with Debian sid down the line while awaiting FreeBSD graphics support.

~

[driekus]

Has anyone here running linux noted the throttling issue that is plaguing the windows i7 variants?

[Supermiguel]

Has anyone here running linux noted the throttling issue that is plaguing the windows i7 variants?

good question

[DStaal]

Since I'd said I'd give my experiences with FreeBSD...

I spent a lot of time trying to get my FreeBSD+ZFS setup to work. Ultimately, I've reverted back to Linux. (I went with Fedora; the latest version has support for everything but the Bluetooth adapter.)

First off, the standard -RELEASE or -STABLE kernels will not boot on an X220. At least, not without tweaks. There are two choices to make them work: Either disable atkbd (the keyboard autodetect/driver) in the kernel, or disable USB booting in the BIOS. In all likelyhood if you go that route, you'll need to do both, at different times: Disable atkbd while running the installer, so you can boot from the CD, and then disable USB booting in the BIOS to allow further booting. (And to allow you to use the built-in keyboard...) (Instructions on how to do this are in the freebsd-questions archive.)

-CURRENT has a work-around for this at the moment, but the developers do not consider it a fix. However it does work and will allow normal booting and install.

-CURRENT also has a new installer, which has some bugs yet; check that your disk partitioning is sane if you are going that route.

As mentioned by others, FreeBSD doesn't yet support the integrated graphics fully. This means the screen is detected in VERSA mode. (And squishing what you see.)

I might have still stuck with that, but for some reason no matter what I did, I could not get my laptop to boot from a ZFS setup. Which meant the main reason for going with FreeBSD (for me) wasn't working. As I never solved it, I'm not sure what the problem was, and there might be a simple fix I couldn't see, but I'd spent enough time playing with it.

I did run the laptop for a while running -CURRENT on a standard UFS install. Which worked fine, as expected. You'll want powerd running to max battery life, but once that is set to start FreeBSD appeared to have better battery life than Linux. (I never pushed it, but it listed battery life in the range of the default Windows install.) You are of course left to configure the box however you want, and that works fine. (Although I don't believe there are many ports built for -CURRENT, so give yourself some time to compile things. KDE or GNOME each take about a day on an i3.)