Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: MatthewRothenberg

• Make: Lenovo

• Brand: ThinkPad

• Model: X60s

• Website: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X60s

• lspci output: /lspci

Current Issues

Currently the biggest issues appear to be:

• Not possible to connect up external monitor without rebooting (Fn + F7 does not work, see below)
• Poor battery life compared to WinXP

More details and some additional problems listed below.

Hardware details

Q&A

Sorted approximately in order of descending importance.

Sleep / Hibernate

* How exactly is one meant to get hibernate working on this thing? At the most basic level, Fn + F12 does not do anything for me... -ChrisHowells

• Not seen that one reported yet. Can you file a bug against acpi-support with the output from /var/log/acpid and from running lshal -m. The logout screen and gnome-power-manager icon also provide buttons to initiate hibernation.' -PaulSladen

• JonathanRiddell also says that for KDE you right-click on klaptopdaemon and click Hibernate -PaulSladen

• Check out this thread in the Gentoo Forums . I haven't been able to try it at all, but the user in the thread said it worked.

Power Management

* [ScottNorris] Power Management seems to be a significant issue on this machine, as is noted in several of the installation reports below. There is a bug filed (#70247), which has gotten very little attention. A relevant online discussion can be found here (thanks to Ari). It appears to possibly be a combination of two things -- the kernel using higher-than necessary voltage values for Core series CPU's, or possibly a failure in the frequency scaling for this CPU/laptop.

* [Ari] An update on the poor battery life and overheating, when comparing to WinXP

1. It appears that the difference comes from the Linux/Dapper kernel not using the "undervoltage" capabilities that the X60s low-voltage-processors have. The good news is that this is being addressed, you can check this project: https://www.dedigentoo.org/trac/linux-phc/

2. The project seems to be very active and I have seen a couple of successful reports on Pentium M machies. Apparently Centrino Duo support is coming too. One piece of advise is, you need to be very careful when playing with this as you can damage your motherboard as reported here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=146366&page=9. If you do test it, please report back your results.

• I googled a bit and came across another program that can undervolt CPUs. It is called CPU Power and it's website is located here: http://www.tuxamito.com.es/cpupw/index.php. If we are able to undervolt the X60s, it should just as cold and as long as with WinXP, right? If anyone has tested undervolting, please let us know. Would be very nice to have decent battery life with Linux for a change. -Casper2

Networking

* I see that wired NIC is apparently supported, but I'm getting some strange problems on mine. It's the 82573L, which uses the e1000 driver. It was not noticed at all when I installed, and I had to unload/reload the driver module using modprobe as described here. Unlike in that thread, it seems to work fine on subsequent reboots. But the strange behavior is that, if I "ping" any test site, every second response take exactly one second, while those in between behave normally (i.e., much faster). I don't really know what's going on, but the combination of "not recognized on install" plus "wierd timing behavior" seemed worth reporting for this laptop. -ScottNorris

• I've got the exact same problem as ScottNorris. It's not only pings, but also there's a lag in ssh-sessions. Larger downloads use the full line speed, though. I tried 2.6.16 and 2.6.17rc3 which did not change anything. -Florg

• Florg and ScottNorris, please can you file a bug on this against linu-source-2.6.15. -PaulSladen

• So filed #42572 -ScottNorris

Hotkeys

* Can you try the latest hotkey-setup that I uploaded last night and see if that makes the Volume keys work? -PaulSladen

• Hi Paul, did a apt upgrade tonight, pulled down version 0.1-14build1, still no luck. -MatthewRothenberg

• Could you try sudo modprobe nvram ; sudo /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup start, currently there's a bug that doesn't check if /dev/nvram exists. -PaulSladen

• This creates /dev/nvram with permissions crw-rw----, but no dice on the volume controls. -MatthewRothenberg

* Question : Are the hotkeys for the volume on the X60 the same as on the T series, entirely managed by the hardware ? -Kaleo

• Kaleo: This is something I don't know the answer to. If you know a way to check I will run it. -MatthewRothenberg

• Sorry, I think I misunderstand something. Does the volume actually change when you press the keys or not at all ? -Kaleo

• Hard to tell, since I do not seem to have audible sound at all apparently with the test files (forgot to mention this in the matrix). However, the buttons also don't appear to adjust any of the status indicators in the gnome sound panel. -MatthewRothenberg

• Could you file a bug please against hotkey-setup and I'll follow it up there and get you to run through a few more things---Yeah you'll need some sound files to play too! :-) -PaulSladen

Mic / Sound

* Tried the microphone. With mic volume unmuted, the headphones play what the mic hears. However, gnome-sound-recorder fails to record any sound. Could this be a gnome issue? I'm using the latest gstreamer and alsa libs. -ScottNorris

• Go to the Mixer, click Capture, toggle the record option just below the Microphone channel, does that sort it?. -PaulSladen

• No, it doesn't. The mic seems to be connected to "Front Mic" as opposed to "Microphone." There's two things to mute/unmute there, the speaker and the microphone. If I unmute the speaker, then I can hear, over the speaker, the things that I'm speaking into the mic (interestingly, this is true whether or not the microphone is unmuted). But If I use gnome-sound-recorder to attempt to record an audio file, and then play back what ought to have been recorded, there's nothing. No static, nothing. This is true regardless of the input to which I connect GSR.
• Have you tried killing esd (sudo killall esd)? This got gnome-sound-recorder and Audacity working for me. Then to get Skype working, you just need alsa-oss.
• Okay, I made no effort to fix this, and after an update to the most recent packages on 17 Aug., the problem has gone away. Updating the table accordingly.

Installation Reports

* [Ari] Quick report after a 6.06/final fresh install:

1. Hibernation / Fn12: worked out of the box
2. Suspend to RAM / Fn4: requires the following to work
   • gedit /etc/default/acpi-support and set
     • ACPI_SLEEP=true ACPI_SLEEP_MODE=mem #SAVE_VBE_STATE=true #POST_VIDEO=true
     • gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst And: in your booting kernel option (/boot/grub/menu.lst), add as an option: acpi_sleep=s3_bios

3. Wireless (ipw3945): works with the default 386 non-smp kernel, and if you change to the smp (which you probably want) please note that you need to install the following metapackage: "linux-686-smp"; if instead you install "linux-686-2.6.x-y-686" etc., you will need to manually install the associated "linux-restricted-modules-2.6.x-y-686" for wireless to work.
4. Frequency scaling: works after you install the smp kernel; you can control it directly from the panel with the "CPU frequency scaling" applet (or: see following item).
5. Sensors: sensor reading via acpi works out of the box; you just need the sensors-applet, add it to your panel and voila, you can monitor each core temp and the fan speed as well.

6. You will probably like to install "laptop-mode-tools" (from: http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/tools/debian.html) and enable laptop mode in your machine. This is daemon & special kernel support that will allow your hard disk to be smartly put to sleep when not in use; you can set up the number of seconds for the disk to wait before this happens; for comparison, Windows most agressive power saving mode uses 30 seconds. For laptop mode to work, you need to enable it in /etc/default/acpi-support, go to the last line and ensure that: ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true

7. if you are using laptop-mode as mentioned above, you can allow this daemon to control the frequency scaling and governor, and for example set it to powersave, or ondemand, and also to act smartly based on the power status (AC vs. Battery); you do this in /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

8. Even with all the above, linux on the X60s makes it run really hot and drains the battery about forty percent faster than Windows (even with all the radios turned off), which is very frustrating. For some reason Windows runs cold, and I want to find this reason and get my eight hours of linux fun.

*Korny2 - I just did a clean install on my X60 using the alternate installer CD and found the following:

• Despite the optimistic "Yes" entry above, hibernate still doesn't work for me and apparently not for some others - I've reverted this to "partial" until the bug #35174 is closed...

• Installation via the text mode installer gets 90% of the way, then presents me with a black screen with occasional white text blobs - however disk and cd activity continues. Eventually activity stops, at which time pressing "enter" ejects the CD, and "enter" again re-boots - it looks like the install is good, but the display is glitched somehow

• Wifi works following instructions above (using linux-686-smp) except the network-manager applet doesn't install properly - following the instructions at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=184684 fixed this.

* [Ari] After Edgy fresh install

1. if you installed it, you probably noticed already that everything works quite well practically out of the box.

2. You probably noticed the same battery life problem as with dapper as well. I've been exploring and following up on this, you might be interested in having a look at this thread: http://www.nabble.com/thinkpad-x60-Battery-Life--%21-tf1971716.html#a7064764

Comments

• I am not entirely sure I should buy this laptop, as I fear the over-heating is too big a problem on this machine. Would anyone be so kind and post what degrees your X60s runs at? In Windows it seems to be around 40 - 45 depending on which module it is. Would be very nice if I could compare. Oh yeah, almost forgot: How long does it take to recharge the 8-cell battery?

Notes

Note 1: You can get the fingerprint reader to work by following this howto.