Thinkpads Forum

I'm looking for tips on installing Linux on my new X1 Carbon Touch. I'm a Fedora user, FWIW, but any tips are appreciated.

Thanks

Fedora is a great distro. Should be a pretty straight forward install.

I shrunk the Windows partition booting from a LiveCD and that went really well. (FWIW, do not bother to do it from inside Windows: It won't give you as much space and it takes an extremely long time. Hours!)

Once that was done, I booted the Fedora LiveDVD and used that to install. It went very smoothly. Booting Linux works by default, but to boot Windows, I need to press F12 at boot time and select the Windows Boot Manager. The GRUB selection doesn't work. I can live with that.

I left Windows on both to try it out, and to use the full capabilities of both multi-touch surfaces for developing HTML5 apps.

I found the installation of Fedora 20 from the x86_64 Live USB to go pretty smoothly. Had some initial trouble with UEFI settings and getting grub to load windows and getting easy bcd to load fedora. So I'm also just using the F12 method to choose the OS at boot time. I haven't yet bothered to fix up grub so that it can successfully load windows.

About the only things I'm having trouble with are:

Fingerprint -- no joy yet. lsusb -v doesn't seem to see the device.

Display resolution -- cinnamon desktop & chrome both seem to have to be tweaked in kludgy ways to display text that's large enough for 55 year old eyes.

How smoothly did Fedora 20 run on the X1?
Although I'm using an older computer (T410s), I'm planning to replace Buntu with Fedora if the 14.04 LTS release doesn't meet my expectations. I've played around with Fedora 19 on a desktop and have been pretty much satisfied other than the occasional lag (albeit it was a 32bit computer was prehistoric hardware).

Other than booting, Fedora 20 continues to run really well on this X1 Carbon Touch.

I "upgraded" Windows to 8.1 which messed with the bootloader again. I'm going to consider it another dufus test if the machine goes missing.

The other thing that happens is that once the machine has been running a while (a good chunk of a day for instance), upon resuming from suspend, the screen will show the last image for up to 30 seconds before showing the current time and quickly turning off (because it was idle for 30 seconds!). It's a minor annoyance, but any tips on that would be appreciated.

As for the fingerprint scanner, mine shows up like this:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 147e:2020 Upek TouchChip Fingerprint Coprocessor (WBF advanced mode)
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 1.10
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 8
idVendor 0x147e Upek
idProduct 0x2020 TouchChip Fingerprint Coprocessor (WBF advanced mode)
bcdDevice 0.01
iManufacturer 1 Auth
iProduct 2 Biometric Coprocessor
iSerial 0
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 39
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 0
bmAttributes 0xa0
(Bus Powered)
Remote Wakeup
MaxPower 100mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 3
bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class
bInterfaceSubClass 0
bInterfaceProtocol 0
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x83 EP 3 IN
bmAttributes 3
Transfer Type Interrupt
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0004 1x 4 bytes
bInterval 20
Device Status: 0x0000
(Bus Powered)