Test Driving Oneiric Ocelot on ThinkPad X120e

It's that time again. With another Ubuntu release looming on the horizon, I decided to upgrade my netbook to the latest daily build (8/12/11) of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, which is still in alpha stage.

Installation

Installation was unchanged from 11.04, so much so, in fact, that it even says "Welcome to Natty Narwhal" :P

As with Natty, installation was quick and easy, with the option to download updates in the background as you go. As before, personalization questions were presented *after* installation had already begun, which saves even more time.

First Impressions

The login screen has changed a bit, and now looks really snazzy, with a stylish dot motif in the background. There's an option to select a Guest Account, along with the option to use the new 2D/non-accelerated Unity desktop, which I believe is powered by the Enlightenment libraries. This 2D desktop supports true transparency, which is nice.

Drivers

The jockey-powered "Additional Drivers" utility automatically found the binary driver for my wireless, which is the nonstandard Broadcom chipset option, so all I had to do is tell it to activate it. CORRECTION: My wireless driver was enabled, but not working. On returning to jockey, the driver was listed as not installed and if I tried to enable it, it would give me the error:

SystemError: E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

This suggests that my packages were installed, but somehow got messed up. To fix it, I had to find out which packages for my chipset were installed, by typing:

dpkg -l | grep roadcom

(notice, I searched for 'roadcom,' which will catch packages with both 'broadcom' and 'Broadcom' in the title and/or description. This is important, as the bcmwl-kernel-source package will not show up if you search for 'broadcom' alone.) Then remove them entirely by typing

sudo apt-get purge [package names from the previous command]

Reboot, then try the 'Additional Drivers' utility again. It should successfully enable the driver, then you can reboot again and everything should be working properly.

If you got the standard chipset, it should use the open source driver by default. The default video driver is the Gallium-3D-driven open source driver, but I chose to install the proprietary fglrx driver from AMD via the driver utility.

Audio seems fine and my HDMI audio hardware and output were both recognized from the start. The headphone jack also properly mutes the internal speakers when headphones are plugged in, which is an improvement over my experience with Natty.

Waking from suspend seems fine, too, though hibernation still seems to be a no-go. :(

Applications

The default email client is now Thunderbird, which works well with Firefox, the default browser, and the default music client is now banshee (this may not have been a new change; I can't really remember...).

The built-in search tool for Unity is much improved, with little icons down at the bottom of the window for choosing whether to search everything, just files and folders, just applications, or just search your music collection.

Everything seems to be fine so far, a solid improvement over Natty on these machines. I'll post back if I run into any problems. If you have any questions or experience any problems, post a comment!

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Configuring Lenovo TrackPoint Mouse Wheel Emulation Scrolling in Ubuntu

I have a Lenovo X120e and have grown accustomed to using the once-loathed TrackPoint (also known as the nubbin, the navigation nipple, the eraserhead, and others) for scrolling through Web pages, windows, etc. as I would with a mousewheel. Here is how you would do it in Ubuntu (in this case 11.04 Natty Narwhal, but it should apply to anything Maverick or later:



Open up a terminal and type:

gpointing-device-settings

UPDATE (8/13/11): The package isn't installed by default in 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, so you'll have to install it first, either through Synaptic package manager or by typing

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

Select the TrackPoint device from the pane on the left. Mine is called "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint." In the middle of the window, you'll see a checkbox labeled "Use wheel emulation." Check the box, along with the ones labeled "Enable vertical scroll" and "Enable horizontal scroll" as you see fit.

You'll also need to select your scroll button from the pull-down menu. In my case, it was button 2, but YMMV.

While you're here, you can also switch to the TrackPad options and disable your trackpad, if that's what you're into.

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Ubuntu Maverick on Lenovo X120e Fusion Laptop

UPDATE 3/23/11: Natty seems to work much better with these systems, so I recommend skipping Maverick and going straight for 11.04, even thought it's still in Alpha stage at the time of this writing. Check out my post about it here.

Original Post:

Due to a wonderful pricing error at Lenovo, I got a really sweet deal on a Thinkpad X120e laptop, featuring AMD's new Zacate Fusion chipset.

When trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on it, though, the Ubiquity installer kept failing with this error:

grub-install efi-dummy failed. This is a fatal error.

To fix this, you need to go into the computer's BIOS and, under the boot tab, change the uEFI settings to try 'legacy' first. This will allow Ubuntu to install grub successfully.

After you make that change, installation should be able to complete and you can reboot into your new system.

That's as far as I've gotten so far, so I'll update this post as I find out more.

Update (3/15/11): I ran into a few more issues that I had to muddle through: wireless networking and waking up after closing the lid of the computer.

First, we'll fix the suspend issue, since it's the easier of the two.

Update 3/23/11: Actually, this doesn't fix anything. It still has problems after a few seconds of having the lid closed (i.e., when it actually goes to sleep). Sorry for any inconvenience. I'll add a real solution if/when I find one.

Open up a terminal and type:

gconf-editor

It will bring up a window with lots of configuration items. Navigate to apps > gnome-power-manager > actions, then change the default entry for sleep_type_battery from 'hibernate' to 'suspend.'

This should get you fixed up.

Now for the tedious one...wireless.

If you have the default Ralink wireless card, for now you'll have to get the driver from the manufacturer's website, build it and install it (download it here). However, the driver *should* work out-of-the-box in Natty.

UPDATE 3/21/11: annoyingly, my system keeps deactivating the driver. I give up on Maverick and have to recommend skipping to Natty instead.

On the recommendation of others, I purchased my machine with the optional Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless card instead of the default Ralink card. Unfortunately, the Broadcom card isn't much better. It uses the 802.11 Linux STA driver, but the device isn't supported by the version available in the official Ubuntu repos. Instead, we'll have to download and install it directly from Broadcom.

To get it going, first you want to download the driver from this page. The drivers are specific to your CPU architecture, so make sure you get the right one. After that, we need to install some prerequisites to build the driver:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Now, we'll navigate to wherever you downloaded the driver (I'm going to assume it's located in the default ~/Downloads directory):

cd ~/Downloads

Decompress the archive:

tar -xvf hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz

and then build and install the driver:

make && sudo make install

The driver is now installed, but we need to activate it and tie up some loose ends. So, still in a terminal, type:

sudo depmod -a

This will fetch all of the dependencies for drivers located in /lib/modules (including our newly installed driver).

Now, we'll make sure no conflicting drivers are in use by typing:

sudo rmmod bcm43xx

sudo rmmod b43

sudo rmmod b43legacy

and then try our new driver out by typing:

sudo modprobe lib80211_crypt_tkip && sudo insmod wl.ko

At this point, your wireless should start working. If it does, we need to make sure conflicting drivers don't start bothering us again by typing:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

and adding these lines:

blacklist b43

blacklist b43legacy

blacklist bcm43xx

Save and exit. Then, back in the terminal, type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and add:

ieee80211_crypt_tkip

at the bottom. Then, type:

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

and add this:

sudo insmod /lib/modules/[whatever your kernel revision is]/wlan/wl.ko

to the end of the file, but before it says "exit 0."

You should be all set at that point. If you need to reverse these steps for whatever reason, just go back through these steps and delete the lines we added.

Last, we'll talk a bit about graphics drivers. The open source drivers do not support our fancy new APU graphics, so we'll have to use the proprietary fglrx driver binary blob from AMD, which you can install through the 'Additional Drivers' applet, located under the System > Administration menus. However, after rebooting, you'll see (at the time of this writing) a translucent black square in the bottom-right corner of your screen that shows an AMD logo and says 'Unsupported hardware.'

This can be avoided by manually installing a newer fglrx driver directly from AMD instead of using the package from the official repos, but that adds its own hassles that I didn't feel like dealing with, such as needing to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. If you would rather go that route, you can find detailed instructions here.

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