Installing Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on a ThinkPad X220

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Revision as of 11:28, 16 May 2012 by Jdthood (Talk | contribs)
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I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Natty Narwhal) on a ThinkPad X220, model 42902GW.

This is the same machine on which I previously installed Ubuntu 11.04. For this LTS release I decided to do a clean install rather than an upgrade from 11.10.

With every release of Ubuntu, more and more aspects of the system work correctly without any manual intervention. Here is a summary of what I nevertheless had to do to get the machine back to the way I like it.

  • Associate my bluetooth HIDs
  • Adjust display layout
    • Problem: With some layouts the machine hangs! Will look into this.
  • Adjust touchpad
    • Switch to two-finger scrolling
    • Disable mouse clicks
  • Install compizconfig-settings-manager and run ccsm:
    • Assign the Resize Windows function to Alt-Button3 which is easier than the default
  • Enable terminal bell:
    • Run gconf-editor and use it to change desktop | gnome | peripherals | keyboard | bell_mode from "off" to "on"
    • Add "pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/glass.ogg bell.ogg" to .xprofile
    • Add "[ "$DISPLAY" ] && xset b 100" to ~/.bashrc
  • Install tp-smapi module
    • Install the tp-smapi-dkms package
    • Add "tp-smapi" to /etc/modules
  • Install HDAPS stuff:
    • Add "hdaps" to /etc/modules
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/thinkpad-extras
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hdaps-utils
sudo modprobe hdaps
hdaps-gl
  • In /etc/sudoers add "Defaults timestamp_timeout=0"

(Without this, every program I run after executing any command with sudo also effectively has full root privileges. This is ungood. If I want to run a sequence of commands as root without having to authenticate every time I'll just do "sudo su" to start a root shell!)

  • Enable fingerprint reader as I described here:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fingerprint/fprint
sudo apt-get install libpam-fprintd fprintd
fprintd-enroll
sudo vi /etc/pam.d/lightdm
  • Disable Unity automaximization
    • Install and run gconf-editor and set apps|compiz-1|plugins|grid|screen0|options|top_edge_action to 0 (originally 10).
  • Move documents, pictures and other personal files from old to new home directory
  • Set desktop background image
  • Set up Empathy accounts, etc.