July 11, 2010 at 03:27Linux ThinkPad x201 review from Linux side
Recently, there was an opportunity to update the Asus EEE combat to a normal combat laptop, which I successfully used. ThinkPad'y liked immediately, the more I knew that almost all the hardware should be supported in Linux without problems (it turned out, alas, it was practically ), and this is the most important factor for me.
All pictures are clickable. Traffic! The machine is good for everyone: dimensions, strength, power, sociability. It weighs about one and a half kilograms with a 4-cell battery (there was a 6-cell battery in the kit, but my battery life is not too critical), there isn’t any noticeable
backlash of the battery. In general, there are not a few reviews of this machine on the Internet, including Habr, so I'll skip the main points, I’ll just say that I took a laptop from the first batch, which arrived in Russia with a full core i5-520m (supports new AES instructions and VT-d). Part number for the curious - 3626-W6E . The only disappointment was the fact that the Chinese are cutting equipment, they no longer put attachments on trackpoints in new syncpads, plus they tear up prices for accessories. Pretty unpleasant.
Together with a laptop I took a docking station for use as a full-fledged workstation. The proof unfortunately has only one digital video output - the modern DisplayPort, which now must be sought in the afternoon with fire. The dock has 4 additional usb, displayport, 2 mini-jacks for microphone and headphones, a power supply connector, kensigton, UltraBay and a lock for locking the dock (about them below), a laptop on / off button with a fuse, absolutely stupid charging for a second battery, VGA-output, replacing the laptop (when connecting the dock, the VGA-output on the laptop is disabled), similarly replaced by Ethernet.
In Ultrabay, you can insert a special cd / dvd / bd drive (differ from laptop size, connector and price) or an adapter for installing 2.5 "sata hdd. On the left there is a catapult handle to free the laptop from the dock. Just before removing it is necessary to release the bus to the docking station / laptop was not damaged (so that hdd in the dock could normally clear the caches and park the heads.) If you lock the lock, the laptop can only be removed using a crowbar or other type of brute force. The same goes for ultra-bay.
Iron on laptop: intel core i5-520m with integrated Intel HD Graphics, built-in hdd was urgently replaced by ssd, 3 gigabytes of RAM, intel wifi / wimax 6250, empty mini pci-e slot for wwan (3g / gps ), Synaptics Touchpad (sort of like ALPS, that is, it supports multi-touch, but not so relevant if you have a trackpoint that can scroll in all directions without much effort), UPEK Touchstrip FingerPrint Reader (about it below).
When trying to start live-cd, the ubants encountered the first unpleasant bug - when the kernel boots, the display turns off. For good. However, the picture is fed to VGA. A quick search in Google showed that the entire Intel platform is still very crude in terms of software support (Intel recently released firmware for the Wi-Fi part of the card 6250). VESA works, but it certainly didn’t suit me, I want to see normal 3D graphics and watch movies. A single-line nuclear patch for i915 fixed the problem, and KMS earned with a laptop. There are still some unpleasant glitches with hot connect / disconnect on DisplayPort, but I hope everything will be fixed in the next six months.
Having dealt with the display, I broke ssd and began to slowly install Gentoo Linux. In connection with the relatively new hardware, I decided to install kernels with git snapshots. Wimax starts only with .35, support for TRIM (increased ssd longevity) appeared in .33, for the 3g / gps modem to work, you need .35 (only gobi qualcomm, a flashed lenovo, can be inserted into the laptop, otherwise bios simply will not allow it to turn on). Problems arose with wimax, the Intel userspace binding is currently only collected in 32 bits. Separately, a few words about the fingerprint scanner. Firstly, bios can use the scanner for authentication, because the scanner, in addition to scanning fingers, can analyze them. Secondly, it fully works under Linux, through the PAM plugin ( Pluggable Authentication Modules
), in theory wherever a password is asked, in practice there is a set of crutches that supports working almost everywhere, of course including the console.
In general, everything works without any problems and complaints, which is not often seen in laptops. Shoals are rather unpleasant and global, but they can be attributed to the age of the platform, everything is relatively quickly fixed. As a bonus, a reading schedule with ssd. Writes at approximately 90M per second.
All pictures are clickable. Traffic! The machine is good for everyone: dimensions, strength, power, sociability. It weighs about one and a half kilograms with a 4-cell battery (there was a 6-cell battery in the kit, but my battery life is not too critical), there isn’t any noticeable
backlash of the battery. In general, there are not a few reviews of this machine on the Internet, including Habr, so I'll skip the main points, I’ll just say that I took a laptop from the first batch, which arrived in Russia with a full core i5-520m (supports new AES instructions and VT-d). Part number for the curious - 3626-W6E . The only disappointment was the fact that the Chinese are cutting equipment, they no longer put attachments on trackpoints in new syncpads, plus they tear up prices for accessories. Pretty unpleasant.
Together with a laptop I took a docking station for use as a full-fledged workstation. The proof unfortunately has only one digital video output - the modern DisplayPort, which now must be sought in the afternoon with fire. The dock has 4 additional usb, displayport, 2 mini-jacks for microphone and headphones, a power supply connector, kensigton, UltraBay and a lock for locking the dock (about them below), a laptop on / off button with a fuse, absolutely stupid charging for a second battery, VGA-output, replacing the laptop (when connecting the dock, the VGA-output on the laptop is disabled), similarly replaced by Ethernet.
In Ultrabay, you can insert a special cd / dvd / bd drive (differ from laptop size, connector and price) or an adapter for installing 2.5 "sata hdd. On the left there is a catapult handle to free the laptop from the dock. Just before removing it is necessary to release the bus to the docking station / laptop was not damaged (so that hdd in the dock could normally clear the caches and park the heads.) If you lock the lock, the laptop can only be removed using a crowbar or other type of brute force. The same goes for ultra-bay.
Iron on laptop: intel core i5-520m with integrated Intel HD Graphics, built-in hdd was urgently replaced by ssd, 3 gigabytes of RAM, intel wifi / wimax 6250, empty mini pci-e slot for wwan (3g / gps ), Synaptics Touchpad (sort of like ALPS, that is, it supports multi-touch, but not so relevant if you have a trackpoint that can scroll in all directions without much effort), UPEK Touchstrip FingerPrint Reader (about it below).
When trying to start live-cd, the ubants encountered the first unpleasant bug - when the kernel boots, the display turns off. For good. However, the picture is fed to VGA. A quick search in Google showed that the entire Intel platform is still very crude in terms of software support (Intel recently released firmware for the Wi-Fi part of the card 6250). VESA works, but it certainly didn’t suit me, I want to see normal 3D graphics and watch movies. A single-line nuclear patch for i915 fixed the problem, and KMS earned with a laptop. There are still some unpleasant glitches with hot connect / disconnect on DisplayPort, but I hope everything will be fixed in the next six months.
Having dealt with the display, I broke ssd and began to slowly install Gentoo Linux. In connection with the relatively new hardware, I decided to install kernels with git snapshots. Wimax starts only with .35, support for TRIM (increased ssd longevity) appeared in .33, for the 3g / gps modem to work, you need .35 (only gobi qualcomm, a flashed lenovo, can be inserted into the laptop, otherwise bios simply will not allow it to turn on). Problems arose with wimax, the Intel userspace binding is currently only collected in 32 bits. Separately, a few words about the fingerprint scanner. Firstly, bios can use the scanner for authentication, because the scanner, in addition to scanning fingers, can analyze them. Secondly, it fully works under Linux, through the PAM plugin ( Pluggable Authentication Modules
), in theory wherever a password is asked, in practice there is a set of crutches that supports working almost everywhere, of course including the console.
In general, everything works without any problems and complaints, which is not often seen in laptops. Shoals are rather unpleasant and global, but they can be attributed to the age of the platform, everything is relatively quickly fixed. As a bonus, a reading schedule with ssd. Writes at approximately 90M per second.
