Lenovo Thinkpad Edge (NUD2EMS) 13" Intel version

Lucid Lynx

Notes:

There aren't enough test cases to really show what is/isn't working on this laptop so i'll summerise things here:

NOT Working

• Headphone jack. See Launchpad Bug #549289 as there is a simple fix for this.

• "multimedia" keys to toggle webcam and wireless on/off and the "projector" key. A workaround for turning off wireless adapter is rf_kill. See lesswatts.org for info.

• Wireless power saving with the Intel WiFi Link 1000 (iwconfig wlan0 power on)

Working

• HDMI out
• Audio over HDMI
• Audio generally (no issues)
• Video generally (no issues)
• Webcam
• SD card
• Suspend/resume
• Wireless
• Wired
• Bluetooth
• Mute, Volume, Brightness and next/previous track keys
• Microphone
• Compiz full effects
• VGA Out

Untested

• Hibernate

• 3g card/GPS (Qualcomm Gobi 2000) Although it is reported as working for NUD2EMS Edge owners in a comment by Matthias Kranz on this site. Be aware that you need the firmware blobs from the Windows 7 installation!

Notes about video playback and hardware acceleration

To play HiDef video in MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 format at 1080p requires the following:

• Support in the video driver
• Support in the media player application

X.org Intel video driver

This laptop comes with the Intel GS45 chipset and the Intel GMA 4500MHD Graphics adapter which supports (in hardware) full acceleration upto 1080p of MPEG-4 AVC video. The Linux driver is currently version 2.90 and does NOT support hardware accelerated decoding of h.264, although according to mailing lists, it is coming in Q3 2010. The current driver does, however support hardware acceleration of DVD video (MPEG-2).

Media player support / Library support

There are 2 methods of hardware acceleration for nVidia/ATI/Intel chipsets; VDPAU or VA-Api. Only VA-api is supported by Intel chipsets in the libva library.

At the moment, the only way to enable hardware acceleration using VA-api in a media player is to buy the Fluendo Codec Pack 11, as this enables support in the Gstreamer backend, supported by Totem, amongst others. Which means that as soon as the Intel driver gets hardware acceleration support, we should be able to run Totem with the Fluendo Codec Pack and get accelerated video. Mplayer does not currently support VA-api, but it does support it in a patch, but this is not included within Lucid Lynx, so you'd probably have to compile and patch Mplayer manually. Mplayer only currently support the VDPAU acceleration library.

UPDATE:

According to this Bug page: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libdrm/+bug/595661

Ubuntu 11.04 will include:

xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.13.0 libdrm2_2.4.22

and libva-1.0.5 can be downloaded from Intel here: http://intellinuxgraphics.org/h264.html

With these 3 components and VLC 1.1.0 or later (or even a patched mplayer from the Intel site) will finally enable h.264 acceleration on the Thinkpad Edge NUD2EMS!