Installing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on a ThinkPad X200

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Revision as of 00:40, 9 October 2008 by Ashaw (Talk | contribs) (Suspend)
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Apologies in advance: The original author of this entry hopes that others will improve on this preliminary effort.

Overview

Undoubtedly, this post will age quickly as 8.10 nears final release. One place for additional information is this X200 owners' thread on the Ubuntu forums.

Started off working w. Ubuntu 8.04 install using the optical drive in the X200 ultrabase. Everything went swimmingly - ethernet worked out of the box as did the optical drive itself.

Wound up upgrading to the 8.10 beta b/c of wireless troubles. See below.


Ultrabay

Handles install without any problem - note: while the machine is in the bay, it forces you to use the ethernet port on the bay.


Ethernet

Intel GigE worked out of the box w. 8.04.

8.10 beta not supporting Intel GigE hardware yet, however (see this technical overview for more details), so unless you wanna try some serious hacking I wouldn't try to do a net install of 8.10 using the ethernet until the final release.


Wireless

Ah, the wireless.

run <lshw -C network> and sort out which wireless hardware you're working with.

For Atheros, check out this forum post

For Intel 5300 on 8.04, neither the recommended drivers (iwl5000) nor ndiswrapper did the trick. It's possible that manually-upgrading the kernel to 2.27 would do it.

On the other hand, with 8.10 the Intel 5300 works out of the box. Running <lshw -C network> again shows that it's the iwlagn driver (pre-loaded with the 2.27 kernel) that does the trick.

Fan

As reported elsewhere, the fan seems to run constantly while the machine is on under 8.04 and 8.10. Will report back if/when I find a fix in the next few days.

Power Mgmt

Not sure what's going on here yet, but the battery claims to have only ~3 hours of life after a full charge.


Suspend

Without tweaking drivers and xorg.conf suspending through the Gnome desktop does not work - seems to be related to the problems with the video card.

Sound

Works out of the box under 8.04 and 8.10

Worth noting the apparent problems w. Skype and Medibuntu on 8.10 - some of this appears to have been resolved recently and will hopefully make it into the final release. Sound playback within Skype still failing despite the workaround.

Camera

Untested.

VGA

"Unclaimed"