Installing Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) on a ThinkPad Edge E135

This is a short guide to installing Debian 7.0 (wheezy, currently testing, installer beta 4) on a ThinkPad Edge E135.

It is sufficient to get the base system running; several subsystems have not yet been tested. As wheezy is not released yet, some steps might not be necessary in the future any more.

Installation

Debian can be installed from a USB device (the E135 does not have an optical drive). The installer asks for firmware for the ethernet and wifi interfaces; those requests can safely be ignored. Wired ethernet will work without the firmware as well (but seems limited to 100mbps). If a firmware-brcm80211 package is provided on an additional USB stick, the module can be loaded and wifi can be used. (Connecting required unusually good signal quality; whether the antenna is just weak or this is a configuration bug remains to be seen.)

Graphics

When the installer has completed and the system reboots, interrupt the bootloader by pressing `c` and write the following commands:

> insmod efi_gop
> insmod efi_uga
> insmod gfxterm
> set gfxmode=auto
> set gfxpayload=keep
> terminal_output gfxterm

Then press Escape, `e` and add these parameters to the kernel line:

radeon.modeset=0 1

Log in using your root password, download all the .bin files from [1] into /lib/firmware/radeon, and install libdrm2 and libdrm-radeon1 from the experimental repositories (>=2.4.40). That can be accomplished by those commands, assuming you are connected to a typical wired network:

# dhclient eth0
# mkdir /lib/firmware/radeon
# cd !$
# wget -m -l1 http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/
# mv people*/*/*/*.bin .
# echo "deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian/ experimental main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list
# sed "s/^deb cdrom/# &/" -i /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get -t experimental install libdrm2 libdrm-radeon1
# reboot

Since GDM and Gnome seem to have issues with the graphics system provided by this setup, that would also be a good time to install xdm and xfce4.

After rebooting, you should be able to log in graphically.

Open issues

• Starting Gnome makes the X server crash for yet-to-be-explored reasons.
• Try the whole setup process with more than an empty standard software selection. (Might interfere with display setup as long the drivers are not installed yet.)
• The GRUB `insmod` lines are not necessary under all conditions. Especially, when an unencrypted disk is used, they seem to be optional; has to do with the early initial password prompt.
• Device doesn't come up after suspend

Hardware status

• Webcam: works
• Card reader: works with SD cards (no others tested)
• Touch pad, track point: work
• wifi: extremely weak
• Ethernet: works
• Regular USB: works

• Untested:
  • USB 3
  • Video connection
  • Audio jack
  • Bluetooth

Tweaks required

Volume keys

Multiple ALSA cards are detected, confusing xfce4-volumed. (In other words, volume buttons don't work). Can be fixed by installing gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio, and possibly setting the pulse audio sound card in the XFCE4 settings. Reported.

WiFi

The wifi card is soft blocked at bootup (meaning that the OS thinks that something in the hardware is suggesting that wifi better be off). It can be explicitly unblocked with the rfkill utility, but in practice, installing the urfkill package is recommended, which makes the toggle-wifi (Fn-F9) hardware button work.

network-manager seems to be able to unlock cards too.

The card seems to be extremely weak in receiving signals, this is to be investigated further.

Further references

• installation report on the Debian bug tracking system