Installing Debian Wheezy (7.0) on a Thinkpad X200s

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Revision as of 20:34, 22 May 2012 by Dmoerner (Talk | contribs) (Summary of installation)
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I have a Thinkpad X200s with:

  • Intel Core2 Duo processor SL9400 (1.86GHz, 6MB L2, 1066MHz FSB)
  • 12.1" TFT display with 1440x900 (WXGA+) resolution (LED backlight) 250 nits
  • Intel WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350

This model has no internal webcam.

I installed Debian Wheezy (7.0) using the Alpha 1 installer from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/News/2012/20120513.

WPA supplicant allowed an internet install, after adding the firmware. I was prompted to insert a USB stick with iwlwifi-5000-{1..5}.ucode on it. The firmware-iwlwifi package which I extracted from http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/firmware-iwlwifi had only iwlwifi-5000-{1,2,5}.ucode. This worked without a hitch. These files were automatically copied to /lib/firmware after the successful install.

I installed the standard gnome-desktop-environment task in tasksel, installing gnome-shell 3.2. Although I selected the "laptop" task, laptop-mode-tools was not installed.

Almost everything worked out of the box, including Wifi, Bluetooth, sound, suspend, and brightness adjustments.

I have not tested hibernation or on-board hardware virtualization.

One thing that does not work properly is suspend-resume on lid close. The package "gnome-tweak-tool" must be installed to support changing these settings. This does work. However, it is not correctly picking up unplug events once one has been triggered. For example, if it is send to blank screen on AC and suspend on battery, if I close the screen on AC and unplug the AC, it should start to suspend. This does not happen. I have filed a bug report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=674048

On Debian Squeeze, the wireless would not properly connect to WPA2-EAP with PEAP networks unless power management for the network card was turned OFF. Otherwise, there were random disconnects (reason=3 in syslog). I have not tested the new kernel with this wireless encryption yet.