Laptop/Lenovo

For newer ThinkPads it is possible to set a stop and resume charge threshold with tpacpi-bat. A user-submitted list of ThinkPads compatible with tpacpi-bat is available here. For many older, pre Ivy Bridge, ThinkPads tp_smapi is available.

Battery Conservation Mode is a feature that limits battery charging to 55-60% of its capacity to improve battery life, being most useful when the laptop tends to run on external power much of the time. This works on many Lenovo laptops like IdeaPad and Thinkbook series. To check if your laptop is supported, try to set the battery conservation mode in the Vantage app on Windows. If it works on Windows, it can be enabled or disabled on Linux in the following manner:

First make sure the ideapad_laptop kernel module is loaded, with the command.

If it is, run the following command as root to enable Battery Conservation Mode:

# echo 1 >/sys/bus/platform/drivers/ideapad_acpi/VPC2004:00/conservation_mode

A 0 will in turn disable the feature.

Passing pci=nocrs as kernel parameter fixes the touchpad. Unfortunately this also disabled my wifi(it was seen by iwctl but never presented a station no matter what i did). I see others online also have this problem(various posts on stackexchange etc). I finally managed to fix it by also passing pci=realloc so the full line is:

pci=nocrs pci=realloc

for getting both wifi and touchpad working.

Note: I am using refind as boot manager(holy cow so much more straight-forward and less confusing than grub2) and i seem to recall being unable to boot with pci=realloc using grub2. This could just be me dreaming though so it probably bears testing first.

Everything else works, except the brightness keys -- which sometimes work, and sometimes do not. I have not figured out in which instance they work or not yet.

Wireless needs linux >= 4.3 and latest linux-firmware, both packages are currently in testing. Copy one of the firmware blobs or from the windows driver to .

Wireless with firmware blobs from windows driver may no longer work on linux >= 4.4. Download firmware blob https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/blob/f428f53b36b144971c9c4c3d2ebd5fa8cae86c89/QCA6174/hw2.1/board-2.bin and copy it to . Tested with linux 4.4.5-1 and linux-firmware 20160113.40e9ae8-1nu

With packages linux 4.6.1-2 and linux-firmware 20160516.80d463b-1 being in stable, wireless works without any additional steps needed.

This laptop requires firmware in order for the soundcard to work. See Advanced Linux Sound Architecture#ALSA firmware.

xf86-video-intel causes Firefox and Chromium to freeze in X11 session. Removing solves the issue.

• UEFI:
  • to be able to disable Secure Boot (necessary for dual boot, not needed for Linux only), you have to switch from "UEFI first" to "UEFI only" (or something like this) in UEFI setup menu; the Secure Boot option appears then on the Security tab
  • after UEFI update having Linux and Windows installed, the Linux bootloader ceased to be the default one, UEFI started to load Windows by default and it was impossible to select the Linux one in the UEFI boot menu and in the UEFI setup - reinstalling the bootloader helped; having no access to a boot media that supports UEFI, a solution might be also replacing the Windows EFI bootloader file with a Linux one temporalily, in order to be able to boot Linux from HDD
  • for the UEFI update, a Windows OS is needed
• Touchpad:
  • Synaptics - works after installing Synaptics drivers from repo, possible to change behaviour (like reaction for double tap) according to your wish
• Video:
  • in laptops with dual video card (Intel and ATI) - detects both, Intel is active as a default, not checked if it's possible at all to switch between them

When you install an SSD in the place of the plate HDD drive and you want to have your HDD still inside the laptop, it is possible to install it in the place of the optical drive in a special "HDD caddy". The optical drive is of 9 mm height, but a 9,5 mm caddy (ultra slim) fits in the slot. A caddy with a SATA interface is needed. It is difficult to separate the front bezel from the original optical drive (and opening its case does not help, but brings a danger of making a mess in the opening mechanism; the only option is just to pull the bezel using a bit of force, but you risk breaking the latches).

While the HDD installed instead of the optical drive operates flawlessly in Windows, it was not going to work out of the box in Linux, at least in one case. The kernel tries to establish a connection with the disk, but fails to do it (SATA link down entry in /var/log/messages). The solution is to force a 1.5 Gbps transfer speed (instead of 6 Gbps) by adding a libata.force= kernel parameter. See for details.

After installing Arch Linux and booting, a single beep may be heard. To disable this beep, press F1 during startup, then change Boot Priority to 'UEFI First', as well as enabling 'CSM'.

• https://natalian.org/archives/2015/02/18/Archlinux_on_a_Lenovo_X1C3/

• Sound:
  • You may have to append to for sound to work.

• Bluetooth (0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]) appears to be functional, even during standby or hibernation.

• ClickPad: the whole trackpad clicks, and disabling the trackpad using older versions of synclient makes the trackpoint essentially unusable. This has been resolved in newer versions of xf86-input-synaptics.
  • See and its previous version, .
  • Install for alternative drivers.
• Audio:
  • HDMI audio is the default audio output device. Consult the ALSA page for details on changing the default.
  • As the X100e/Mini10, it's possible to mute the headset and speaker outputs separately to the master. Muting the speaker output improves bass output on the headset port.
  • If the system fails to wake from sleep, it can lose sync with the internal audio card and speakers/headphones may fail to work. In this case, put the system to sleep, and wake it again and audio functionality should be restored.
• The fingerprint sensor is a Validity VFS5011, available in fprint.
• thinkpad_acpi:
  • To toggle Fn-Lock, press Fn + Esc, this will toggle the LED on the keyboard. While the Fn LED is on all Fn functionalities work as intended out of the box.
  • Controlling the 'glowing I' LED is apparently not possible.
  • fan control does not seem to work.
• Graphics and Video:
  • With the integrated GPU, xrandr can crash while attaching or detaching displays connected via the dock.
  • The built-in miniDisplayPort will sometimes spew I²C issues into the kernel log.
  • Hardware video acceleration is highly recommended as it performs significantly better than CPU decoding of large media files.
  • The BIOS should not be upgraded past version 1.14, as newer BIOSes cause memory corruption when used with Bumblebee. See Bumblebee GitHub
• Connectivity:
  • Bluetooth is extremely fragile. The controller works fine most of the time, but can cause the system to wedge totally on sleep/wake cycles, especially if a connection was active at sleep. Disable the controller using before sleeping.

• No automatic brightness adjusting when switching power supply battery <-> AC

• Hardware specifications of test device
  • CPU: Intel CORE i7-6600U @ 2.60GHz or Intel CORE i5-6200U @ 2.30GHz or Intel CORE i5-6300U @ 2.40GHz
  • GPU Primary: Intel HD 520
  • GPU Secondary: Nvidia GeForce 940MX or None
  • WiFi: Intel 8260
  • Ethernet: Intel I219-LM
  • Card reader: Realtek RTS522A

• Although not officially supported, the fingerprint scanner works with (tested 14 July 2021 on Linux 5.12.15)

• Tested with broadcom-wl-dkms 802.11 wireless driver
• Synaptics touchpad required 3 patches to linux:drivers/hid/hid-rmi.c on 2015-07-26 (bug report, kernel recipe patch). The current 4.3 kernel includes these patches. You will also need to install the xf86-input-synaptics package.

There is an issue with tpacpi-bat not reporting the right value for the stop threshold. This seems to be related to a buggy BIOS and can not be fixed application wise.

See https://github.com/teleshoes/tpacpi-bat/issues/44

Solution: Update BIOS (at least 1.08).

• The subwoofer does not work out of the box.
  • See https://gist.github.com/BXZ/48cd8173807676a1402cf4bc7928c0c0 to get it working.

• Panel Self-Refresh (PSR) can cause the screen to randomly freeze every few minutes. This can be fixed by disabling PSR.
  • See https://reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/gu0a8a/ for more details.

• In order to get sound you need to install
• On the AMD version, the internal microphone requires a kernel version of at least 5.8-rc7 with and . 4-pin jack plugs work with a linux kernel of 5.7.