Looking for a lightweight, solid and powerful little laptop that works with GNU/Linux? Me too. I have bad news: it doesn’t not exist. Thinkpad X61s seems close, however. Here is my (success?) story about getting it to work with Ubuntu and Fedora with some tips and tweaks to save you time and patience.

Author: Borys Musielak

Choosing a lightweight yet powerful Linux laptop

Selecting a laptop has always been a hard task for me. There’s so much choice at the first sight but when it comes to making the decision, each model is lacking some feature you are looking for. This time was no different. I was looking for a light, tiny (12-13”, preferably wide-screen) and reliable Linux-compatible laptop. After weeks of research I went for Thinkpad X61s. But my first choice was actually different.

Toshiba Portege R500 model brought my attention for its slick design, minimal weight — the version with regular hard drive was under 1 kilogram (~2 pounds) — and the fact it had a bundled DVD writer. I ordered one for testing but I had to return it because of a bad pixel on the LCD screen (by the way, Laptopsdirect.co.uk really sucks in terms of user service) within a week. I quite liked playing with it, though. It looked pretty solid, it worked well with Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 got installed without a minor issue) and it was indeed the lightest laptop I’ve ever seen and used. The only flaw (though a major one) was its performance. Portege R500 ships with a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB RAM (extensive to 1.5GB only due to its construction — a 512MB memory chip in bind to the mainboard). It runs acceptably fast most of the cases. But when you perform many tasks at a time, it gets worse. Much worse. And on Windows Vista (which was preloaded on the machine) it was like a brick. Fortunately it was impossible to order it (replace with a decent model) in the UK in December 2007 due to stock shortage so I did not have to make a difficult choice of choosing between the Portege and the Thinkpad and just took the latter.

Thinkpad X61s

What about other choices? Well, there was Acer Ferrari, Dell XPS and a Sony Vaio (TZ150N model) in the game as well, all with similar specs to the X61s model. However, I don’t trust Acer as far as laptops are concerned and Sony has a bad history of Linux support, so I went for a Lenovo Thinkpad since this is the technology I know and trust.

Thinkpad X61s is a tiny laptop with a 12 inch regular LCD. It weights about 1.1 kg and features:

• a 1.6GHz Intel Core2Duo CPU,
• 2GB RAM,
• a 120GB hard drive,
• and mostly Intel hardware (including a video card, sound card, wireless card).

The last point is especially important to Linux users since Intel is known for its decent Linux support. It provides open source drivers to lots of its devices and if the driver is not provided, the company usually shares the specs with external developers who can then implement the high quality drivers on their own. This can’t be said about NVidia and ATI (now AMD) who have traditionally been reluctant to supporting open source (AMD is currently trying to change the way we see it, but this is a completely different story).
Of course X61s has its weaknesses as well:

• a regular display with only 1024×768 resolution (Lenovo does not produce laptops with wide screens at all),
• no bundled CD/DVD drive,
• limited battery life (2 hours of intensive work),
• its price (over £1200).

Still comparing the pros and cons of the Thinkpad and other options in the area of small Linux-friendly and powerful notebooks, the choice was pretty simple. I went for X61s and I don’t regret it. But for now, the story just begins…

PS. While writing this article (yeah, this took me a while), two new possible choices appeared: Macbook Air and Thinkpad X300 (the latter not yet available in retail, though) so if you are looking for a powerful laptop with wide-screen display these two may be worth some research, as well.

Choosing the right distro for my Thinkpad

As I’m a GNOME fan and I like things going automatic the only two viable choices seemed to be Ubuntu and Fedora. I am a long time Ubuntu and Debian user. That’s why I installed Ubuntu 7.10 first. After configuring everything I tested Fedora 8 as well and I now dual boot between those systems with a shared part of the /home folder.

 
Ubuntu and Fedora GNOME desktops side by side

Thinkpad X61s and Ubuntu Linux 7.10

I have installed Ubuntu using PXE mode, since at the time of installing, the external CD drive hadn’t arrived, yet. It was fully automatic and after some 40 minutes I had my system running. Ubuntu configured my computer correctly. I was surprised that most of the keyboard bindings (also for the Thinkpad-specific keys) worked correctly out of the box. The screen resolution was also selected properly, so I could enjoy my new OS right from the beginning. After playing with it however, a few glitches showed up, followed by another few. Here are my notes regarding them and some resolutions.

Network issues

NetworkManager doesn’t work. I have always had some problems with it but this time it apparently refused to cooperate completely. It seemed to work, though. It displayed all the networks I could possibly connect to, remembered all the settings (passwords, connection details) and such. The only things is that… it was unable to connect to any wireless network! I “solved” the problem by disabling NetworkManager (which is described on the Ubuntu wiki) and using regular GNOME network manager to manually enter connection details. Definitely not as comfortable but I can with with is.

Suspend to RAM and hibernation

Suspend to RAM caused me some problems in the beginning. It worked every now and then. I later discovered that it usually does work fine when I disable Compiz and remove all the wireless and USB kernel modules (see: Battery life section for details) before putting it to sleep. The problem that remained is that after it wakes up from sleep mode, the LCD screen is very dark and I’m able to regulate it, unless I… switch to the terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) and switch back to GUI (CTRL+ALT+F7). I have seen descriptions of similar bugs on the Internet in relation to Thinkpads so I guess this is no coincidence. Suspend to disk (hibernation) does work without issues (but I always disable Compiz and remove the modules anyway before using it, just to feel safer).

Multimedia keys

Funny thing — although all multimedia keys have been associated with correct actions by GNOME (System->Preferences->Keyboard shortcuts), turning the volume up and down didn’t work. It did show the regulator and it was reacting on the correct keys but the volume stayed as it was. Accidentally I discovered that what it tried regulating was… my microphone volume, not the PCM volume! Quite an interesting bug, that is. I managed to switch it to focus on PCM in the Colume Control Preferences (accessible in Preferences after right-clicking on the volume applet on the GNOME toolbar). Unfortunately this didn’t do the job for the key bindings which still seem to regulate the microphone volume and I see no obvious way to alter its behavior.

Sound card issues

Speaking about the sound, it was turned off by default and due to the fact I could not regulate it I was sure it didn’t work at all. Moreover, when I launched alsamixer, I noticed lots of standard sound control options were missing, narrowing the choice to the standard ones — regulate PCM, microphone, beep, headphones and such. Perhaps this is due to the very limited capabilities of the Thinkpad’s audio device. But it may be also some kind of driver problem. To be discovered.

Limited alsamixer settings in Ubuntu

Compiz — fancy desktop effects

Compiz-Fusion kind of worked right out of the box (except for the suspend problem). After a few weeks of using Ubuntu it however stopped working. When I tried to enable it (System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects), GNOME told me that “desktop effects could not be enabled”. I need Compiz so that I can impress frustrated Windows users (normally I tend to disable them anyway since they bring little additional value, slow down my desktop and disable my favorite ALT+1-4 shortcuts to switch between desktops).

Still I managed to bring the 3D effects back. It turned out that Ubuntu not allowing me to switch these effects on after an upgrade was a feature, not a bug. This was caused by some compatibility issues Ubuntu detected with my laptop. Basically, it did not allow me to turn the fancy effects on because it cared for my health. Good Ubuntu! Nothing can stop us however from disabling the check and running Compiz anyway on your own risk. If you’re brave enough, just add the following line to file /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager:

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

and then enable the effects in System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effect and… enjoy it!

For more configuration options, install packages compiz-fusion-plugins-main and compiz-fusion-plugins-extra.

Battery life

I’ve heard that my Thinkpad should work efficiently for about 6 hours on batteries (when the external one is attached). This was not what I experienced. The battery life was about half that time when I first tested it. Not a decent score for a £1200 laptop, I thought. And I took action. It turned out that Intel delivers a decent tool called powertop. It collects data about power usage, estimates the remaining battery life and displays the programs that cause the most hard disk wake-ups from idle (which is a very power-hungry operation). Powertop also displays tips concerning improving the battery life.

Powertop saves some battery life

After playing with it for a while I came up with this script which I execute at the beginning of the system startup sequence (jus save it as in /etc/init.d and link to it from /etc/rc2.d:

echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
mount -o remount,noatime /
ethtool -s eth0 wol d

I also use four other scripts to enable and disable USB and wifi when I don’t need it, since this seems to be one of the causes of low battery life as well.

# cat unload-usb.sh
/sbin/rmmod ehci_hcd uhci_hcd ohci1394

# cat unload-wifi.sh
/sbin/rmmod iwl4965
/sbin/rmmod iwlwifi_mac80211

# cat load_usb.sh
modprobe uhci_hcd
modprobe ohci1394
modprobe ehci_hcd

# cat load_wifi.sh
modprobe iwl4965
modprobe iwlwifi_mac80211

After applying all of these tips my laptop works about 4 hours on batteries when no USB and WiFi is required (which is usually the case when I need long battery life). Still nothing comparable to the reported 6 hours, but good enough. I tested the laptop on Windows XP which was the pre-installed OS and it seemed very similar — maybe only up to 30 minutes longer than Ubuntu. Perhaps Vista does better here? Yet to be discovered.

One more strange discovery, though. When I have two batteries in place (the built-in one and an additional one mounted to the bottom of the laptop) it is very important that the system first uses up the external one. When I mounted the external battery just before the built-in one got discharged, Ubuntu would not allow me to use my laptop anymore claiming that the battery is fully discharged and forcing me to shutdown. Of course I was able to change this behavior in GNOME Power Management Preferences, but I really don’t want to since putting the system to sleep or shutting down when battery is very low is a useful feature that saves me from potential file system issues upon unenexpected poweroff.

Ubuntu: short summary

As you can see there have been quite a lot of issues, but fortunately none of them was unpleasant enough to make me switch to another OS. In general it seemed that the Thinkpad X61s is still quite well supported under Ubuntu, taking into consideration it’s a quite modern laptop with some unusual settings. After a few weeks of trying I learned to use it properly and I’m very happy with my configuration right now. I’m sure that with new releases of Ubuntu the laptop will be supported even better.

Thinkpad X61 and Fedora 8

The second distribution I tried on my Thinkpad was latest Fedora. I did not try it because I was not satisfied with my Ubuntu settings, I tried it out of curiosity, to see how well it copes with my laptop and whether it is able to resolve some issues I had with Ubuntu as described above.

The installation was trivial, since I used the external DVD drive that had just arrived. It went smooth, no issues whatsoever. Fedora detected the screen resolution properly and installed itself on a small partition I prepared just for the sake of testing different Linux flavors.

General Fedora thoughts

Fedora desktop itself made a good impression on me. It started with a nice-looking boot process. It presented a Fedora logo and a progress bar. Detail view was available at all times if you’d like to see which services are starting and analyze any errors that may appear during the system boot. After logging into GNOME, the good impression remained. The theme was clean, the menus much better organized than in Ubuntu (Preferences have been divided here into groups basing on their function) and the overall usability seemed a bit better.

What I didn’t like was the unavailability of proprietary extensions (multimedia codecs, Flash, Adobe Reader, Sun Java, Windows fonts, Opera, Skype and others). I know I know… Fedora people try to be more saint than RMS himself. Still, there should be some easy way to get the non-free ugly all-evil baby-seal-killing codecs for stuff such as DivX, DVD, MPEG-4 and such. In Ubuntu it’s as simple as typing sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras in terminal. In Fedora to get the evil stuff working (including the codecs, Windows fonts and programs like Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader) I had to manually add a Livna repository and then enter multiple commands to get what I want.

In other areas however Fedora is doing better and better in each release. I noticed in F8 they finally introduced a fast-install option (click on an RPM and it just installs) and an add-remove applications panel, following good usability decisions of the Canonical-sponsored distro.

Problems, problems…

Fedora’s GNOME looked exactly like the one I knew from Ubuntu. A different theme, a few different choices in defaults and conservative approach to proprietary stuff, that’s it I thought. Not quite so. As Ubuntu was pretty much configured out of the box, Fedora seemed to ignore lots of my laptop’s options:

• Sound didn’t work at all. Kind of. At least the default configuration for Rhythmbox and Amarok failed to play any sound for multimedia files. Surprisingly, Mplayer didn’t have that problem with audio. It played a Real Media file (after the codecs have been already installed) with only minor hitch being a constantly flashing error message about unavailability of PCM control. Is this some issue with my Thinkpad or rather the result of introducing a new PulseAudio framework? No clue. The thing is — it didn’t work and I could not easily fix it.

Alsamixer in Fedora. Tot too much to configure

• It refused to understand my multimedia keys for sound control, just as Ubuntu (although Ubuntu at least tried :P).
• What is way worse, it did not understand the middle mouse click, either emulated (pressing left and right button at the same time) or the special Thinkpad key that represents it. Ubuntu had no problem recognizing it straight from the beginning. Fedora just ignored it.
• Laptop’s brightness control was also a crazy one. The function keys for controlling the brightness kind of worked (proper images appeared on the screen suggesting that everything was fine), but the level of actual brightness unfortunately worked only every now and then. The issue with broken controls was usually appearing while using the laptop after getting back from a suspend state. But this was not always the case and often it just didn’t cooperate straight after reboot.
• I also tested the KDE version delivered with Fedora, as I selected it as the alternative desktop when installing Fedora. This was a complete mistake. It seemed like some beta version of this environment (but it was still KDE 3.5!) not a stable one. None of the laptop features worked fine, neither the keys, suspend or even wifi. I hoped at least Bluetooth would work fine. No, neither did the memory card readers. What is the idea behind delivering such an unstable and not tested version of KDE desktop in Fedora? I could not figure this out.

There were some good points of Fedora though. NetworkManager worked fine in this distribution (it’s Red Hat who first introduced this useful widget, by the way) out of the box when using GNOME. So I did not have to manually configure the network as in Ubuntu. Suspend to RAM and disk was faster and just worked. Also Compiz worked in the default installation and did not seem to cause trouble and the system did not force me to shut down when the main battery was fully discharged.

Fedora: short summary

Fedora was not as well supported under my Thinkpad as Ubuntu, but it was not bad at all. If I spend a few more hours understanding the issues and solving the laptop-specific problems, I would probably make it work just as fine as Ubuntu or even better. The reason I stayed with the Debian derivative was mostly my long time habits and the fact that Ubuntu just worked better out of the box so I didn’t not have to spend a lot of extra time tuning stuff. All Fedora users should be however able to fix the problems I mentioned very quickly and use their Thinkpads with their favorite distro normally.

What I haven’t tested

Thinkpad X61s has a fingerprint reader that is supposed to enhance the security of your OS. Unfortunately I was unable to use this feature even on Windows XP. After some 15 minutes of trying to force it to understand my fingerprints I gave up since it was not worth the effort. There is special software to use this reader under Linux as well, but as you might guess I did not even want to try it.

General conclusions

After almost two months of using Thinkpad X61s on Linux I have to say I pretty much like it. Its Linux support — for such a recent model — is quite remarkable. Of course I might wish it all worked out of the box, but as far as my requirements are concerned, I can’t complain. If I find some time in the close future I’ll try to test a few other distros on my laptop. I already have SimplyMEPIS 7.0 and Mandriva 2008 in the queue. It’s however unlikely that I’m going to switch from Ubuntu anytime soon, since I follow the saying “if it works, don’t fix it!”.

Cheers,

Borys Musielak