Installing OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 on a ThinkPad T500

Model

Lenovo Thinkpad T500 2081-CTO, BIOS 6FET76WW (3.23)

General

I installed OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 from DVD, selecting the default KDE desktop. Almost everything works as it should, but I did have some problems with the graphics.

Graphics

As User:Johnny noted in Installing OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 on a ThinkPad T500 the fast GPU consumes too much power (about 7W) so I disabled Switchable Graphics in the BIOS many years ago and now use just the Intel i965 graphics.

I found that the screen would often stay black after bootup, sometimes with a mouse cursor. The first workaround that I found was to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/49-device-intel.conf containing this:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Intel Graphics"

  Driver "modesetting"
  Option "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
  Option "DRI" "3"
  Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
EndSection

The effect is to swap from the glamor accelerator to uxa - this makes the graphics usable, but I found that the bottom of the screen jumped occasionally (as if the screen has lost sync with the graphics chip). A better solution was to remove that file again and to install a much newer kernel. The reasoning here is that the modesetting driver got some important fixes upstream after Leap 42.3 was frozen for release. I chose to use the HEAD kernel. The process to do it is described here: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.tuning.multikernel.html and it goes something like this:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/HEAD/standard/ kernel-repo
zypper ref
cd /; tar cf /root/boot-backup.tar boot
zypper install kernel-default-4.14.2-2.1.g56423d9

That gave me kernel 4.14.2-2.g56423d9-default and the graphics has been stable ever since.

Specific Features

• Suspend to RAM works out of the box.
• WiFi is OK (though it helps to get a simple form of Kwallet to unlock at login time - see https://gist.github.com/Trucido/b788017a18e1189e6703e42315e8829c)
• Ethernet is OK
• Internal Graphics (Intel) is OK with the newer kernel
• USB is OK
• Camera is OK
• Sound is OK
• Plays videos and DVDs if the relevant codecs are installed (See https://opensuse-community.org/)
• Touchpad is OK (though I always disable most of the features to avoid accidental actions)
• VMWare 12 runs OK though you will need the patches here: http://www.hendrik-woltersdorf.de/linux/vmware/vmware_player_12.5.7_patched_mods_for_os_42.3.zip
• VMWare Workstation 14.x will not work on this hardware. It needs a more recent CPU.