Installing OpenSUSE 11.4 on a ThinkPad X220 Tablet
Contents
Model
Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Tablet 4299-2PG (NYN2PMH) with 160GB Intel SSD.
Installation
There is no internal optical disk, so I used an external drive (Samsung, feeds from two USB ports). Worked flawlessly without the need to change BIOS settings.
Screen, network etc all detected correctly... only no touchscreen features out of the box. The package installation (GNOME and KDE together) took about 15 minutes (!)
Disk partitioning
The system was shipped with an 160GB SSD disk (SSDSA2M160), with three partitions
- 1 GB NTFS "System_DRV"
- 132 GB NTFS "Windows7_OS", drive C: with 30GB used
- 16 GB NTFS "Lenovo_Recovery"
No D: partition to sacrifice. The default partitioning change offered by SuSE installation seems ok, but I like to take it in my own hands. So, I
- resized partition Windows7 back to GB
- add extended partition for the rest
- add 20GB partition for SuSE "/" with ext4 and noatime
- add 20GB partition, later to be used for Debian/Qimo with ext4 and noatime
- add 2GB partition for swap (hopefully not used)
- add remaining 40GB for partition "/home" with ext4 and noatime
Configuration
Add "tabletpc" to the software selection. I also use both KDE and GNOME window managers via the software selection menu.
Skype
The default installation is 64bits. Skype does not offer a 64bit version for OpenSuSE (yet), so you have to install some additional libraries for it to work:
# required for Skype 2.2beta zypper in xorg-x11-libXv-32bit libqt4-32bit libqt4-x11-32bit libpng12-0-32bit
Webcam, sound and microphone worked without further configuration.
Multimedia
Go to Community Restricted Formats for a one-click install of proprietary drivers. I selected both the KDE and GNOME extensions.
Modifications
Display Brightness
I really hate the automatic dimming the screen. With the excellent battery-life and working brightness-control buttons, there is no need for the frequent dimming.
Under GNOME, click on the battery image on the lower bar, select "Preferences". In "On Battery Power", untick the "Reduce backlight brightness" and "Dim display when idle".
