Review of Lenovo ThinkPad x201 from linuksoid
Recently there was an opportunity to upgrade the Asus EEE combat to a normal combat laptop, which I successfully used. ThinkPad'y liked immediately, the more I knew that almost all the iron should be supported without problems in Linux (it turned out, alas, it was practically ), and this is the main factor for me.
All pictures are clickable.
Traffic!
All good machine: dimensions, strength, power, sociability. It weighs about one and a half kilograms with 4 cell batteries (the bundle was 6 cells, but for me the battery life is not too critical), there is no noticeable backlash of the battery. In general, reviews of this machine on the Internet are not few, including Habr, so I’ll skip the main points, I can only say that I took the laptop from the first batch, which arrived in Russia with a full core i5-520m (supports new AES instructions and VT-d). Part room for the curious - 3626-W6E . I was disappointed only by the fact that the Chinese are cutting back the bundle, they are no longer investing trackpoint points in the new syncpad, plus prices for accessories. Pretty unpleasant.
')
He took a docking station with a laptop, for use as a full-fledged workstation. The docking station unfortunately has only one digital video output - a modern DisplayPort, which is now to be found in the afternoon with fire. The dock has 4 additional usb, displayport, 2 minijack for a microphone and headphones, a connector for the power supply, a kensigton, UltraBay and a lock for locking the dock (see below), a laptop on / off button with a fuse, absolutely stupid charging for a second battery, VGA-out, replacing laptop (when the dock is connected, the VGA-out on the laptop is turned off), similarly replacing Ethernet.
In Ultrabay, you can insert a special cd / dvd / bd drive (different from notebook size, connector and price) or an adapter for installing 2.5 "sata hdd. On the left there is a handle-catapult to free the laptop from the docking station. Just before removing it, you must release the bus to the docking station / laptop was not damaged (so that the hdd in the dock could normally reset the caches and park the heads). If you lock the lock, the laptop can only be removed with a broom or other kind of bruteforce. The same goes for ultrabay.
For hardware in the laptop: intel core i5-520m with integrated graphics Intel HD Graphics, built-in hdd was urgently replaced by ssd, 3 gigabytes of RAM, intel wifi / wimax 6250, empty mini pci-e slot under wwan (3g / gps ), Synaptics Touchpad (sort of like ALPS, that is, supports multitouch, but not so important if you have a trackpoint that can scroll in all directions without much effort), UPEK Touchstrip FingerPrint Reader (see below).
When trying to launch live CDs, the Ubants encountered the first unpleasant bug - when the kernel boots, the display turns off. All right. However, the VGA picture is served. A quick search in Google showed that the whole Intel platform is still very raw in terms of software support (the firmware for the Wi-Fi part of the 6250 Intel card was released recently). VESA works, but it certainly didn’t suit me, I would like to see normal 3D graphics and watch movies. A single-line nuclear patch for i915 fixed the problem, and KMS started working with the laptop. There are still some unpleasant glitches with hot plugging / unplugging on DisplayPort, but I hope in the next six months everything will be fixed.
Having dealt with the display, I broke the ssd and started to install Gentoo Linux slowly. In connection with the relatively new hardware, I decided to install kernels with git snapshots. Wimax starts only with .35, TRIM support (increasing ssd longevity) appeared in .33, for a 3g / gps modem to work, you need .35 (only gobi qualcomm can be inserted into the laptop, lenovo flashed, otherwise bios just won't let you go). Problems arose with wimax, Intel's userspace binding is currently only assembled in 32 bits.
Separately, a few words about the fingerprint scanner. First of all, bios can use a scanner for authentication, because the scanner can analyze them in addition to finger scanning. Secondly, it fully works under Linux, through the plugin to PAM ( Pluggable Authentication Modules ), in theory wherever a password is asked, in practice there is a set of crutches that supports operation almost everywhere, of course including the console.
In general, everything works without any problems and complaints, which is not often seen in laptops. The shoals are rather unpleasant and global, but they can be attributed to the age of the platform, everything is fixed relatively quickly. As a bonus - reading schedule with ssd. Writes at approximately 90M per second.
All pictures are clickable.
Traffic!
All good machine: dimensions, strength, power, sociability. It weighs about one and a half kilograms with 4 cell batteries (the bundle was 6 cells, but for me the battery life is not too critical), there is no noticeable backlash of the battery. In general, reviews of this machine on the Internet are not few, including Habr, so I’ll skip the main points, I can only say that I took the laptop from the first batch, which arrived in Russia with a full core i5-520m (supports new AES instructions and VT-d). Part room for the curious - 3626-W6E . I was disappointed only by the fact that the Chinese are cutting back the bundle, they are no longer investing trackpoint points in the new syncpad, plus prices for accessories. Pretty unpleasant.
')
He took a docking station with a laptop, for use as a full-fledged workstation. The docking station unfortunately has only one digital video output - a modern DisplayPort, which is now to be found in the afternoon with fire. The dock has 4 additional usb, displayport, 2 minijack for a microphone and headphones, a connector for the power supply, a kensigton, UltraBay and a lock for locking the dock (see below), a laptop on / off button with a fuse, absolutely stupid charging for a second battery, VGA-out, replacing laptop (when the dock is connected, the VGA-out on the laptop is turned off), similarly replacing Ethernet.
In Ultrabay, you can insert a special cd / dvd / bd drive (different from notebook size, connector and price) or an adapter for installing 2.5 "sata hdd. On the left there is a handle-catapult to free the laptop from the docking station. Just before removing it, you must release the bus to the docking station / laptop was not damaged (so that the hdd in the dock could normally reset the caches and park the heads). If you lock the lock, the laptop can only be removed with a broom or other kind of bruteforce. The same goes for ultrabay.
For hardware in the laptop: intel core i5-520m with integrated graphics Intel HD Graphics, built-in hdd was urgently replaced by ssd, 3 gigabytes of RAM, intel wifi / wimax 6250, empty mini pci-e slot under wwan (3g / gps ), Synaptics Touchpad (sort of like ALPS, that is, supports multitouch, but not so important if you have a trackpoint that can scroll in all directions without much effort), UPEK Touchstrip FingerPrint Reader (see below).
When trying to launch live CDs, the Ubants encountered the first unpleasant bug - when the kernel boots, the display turns off. All right. However, the VGA picture is served. A quick search in Google showed that the whole Intel platform is still very raw in terms of software support (the firmware for the Wi-Fi part of the 6250 Intel card was released recently). VESA works, but it certainly didn’t suit me, I would like to see normal 3D graphics and watch movies. A single-line nuclear patch for i915 fixed the problem, and KMS started working with the laptop. There are still some unpleasant glitches with hot plugging / unplugging on DisplayPort, but I hope in the next six months everything will be fixed.
Having dealt with the display, I broke the ssd and started to install Gentoo Linux slowly. In connection with the relatively new hardware, I decided to install kernels with git snapshots. Wimax starts only with .35, TRIM support (increasing ssd longevity) appeared in .33, for a 3g / gps modem to work, you need .35 (only gobi qualcomm can be inserted into the laptop, lenovo flashed, otherwise bios just won't let you go). Problems arose with wimax, Intel's userspace binding is currently only assembled in 32 bits.
Separately, a few words about the fingerprint scanner. First of all, bios can use a scanner for authentication, because the scanner can analyze them in addition to finger scanning. Secondly, it fully works under Linux, through the plugin to PAM ( Pluggable Authentication Modules ), in theory wherever a password is asked, in practice there is a set of crutches that supports operation almost everywhere, of course including the console.
In general, everything works without any problems and complaints, which is not often seen in laptops. The shoals are rather unpleasant and global, but they can be attributed to the age of the platform, everything is fixed relatively quickly. As a bonus - reading schedule with ssd. Writes at approximately 90M per second.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/98787/
All Articles