This summer my beloved thinkpad x301 died in a cloud of smoke. It was exactly 3 years and 20 days old while my warranty was valid only for 3 years. Now, don’t tell me this is a coincidence. Anyway. After about 5 months, I finally managed to convince my employer to get me a new thinkpad, the x220. My specs includes a 128G SSD , 4G of RAM, 2.4Gz processor, camera and fingerprint reader.
It’s a pity that the x300 series is not in production anymore. They were light, with a solid battery and a large screen. The X1 just don’t cut it. Even though it can be consider the successor of the x300, its battery life is just not enough for my needs. On the other hand, the x220 is a very nice machine : the screen is a bit smaller then the X300, but it is light, with a very powerful processor, good battery and it feels very solid. In my opinion lenovo should have packed the new hw of the x220 in the chassis of the x300, maybe with small compromise on the battery life (I got the big battery and I can squeeze almost 7 hs with a single charge) but clearly this was not a good business choice…
Installing debian on this laptop is not immediate because none of the official debian installers are shipped with a recent kernel (as in 3.x series). Since with the official debian installer I cannot have neither the driver for the Ethernet card or the driver for the wirelles card, I opted to use a custom installer built by kmuto (http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i/ ) . Using this installer the ethernet card is recognized immediately and it’s easy to proceed with the installation as usual. Another option would have been to add the binary blog for the wireless chip, but apparently the deb installer supports only WEP auth, while all my access point are WPA. I didn’t spend too much time on the wireless setup, so it might well be that is indeed possible to install using a WPA access point.
Last time I installed a laptop, I used the automatic partition option to have lvm on top of a lucks encrypted partition, only to discover later that the default dimensions of the partitions were a bit too small for me. For example, by default the boot partition is only 256Mb. This is plenty if you want to have only one kernel image installed at each given time, but if you want more then one kernel, memtest and for example a grml rescue iso, it’s easy to run out of space.
So I proceed to manually partition the disc creating a boot partition of 512M, and using the rest as a luks encrypted device with lvm on top and 3 logical volumes : sys (15G), swap (4G) and home (the rest). For my daily use having 15G on my laptop for /usr, /var, etc should more the enough…
Next step was to install the system. Since in recent times I got extremely pissed off with gnome 3, I’ve decided to dump it completely and go back to awesome. But since awesome all by itself is a bit sad, I paired it up with xfce. Everything works, except the automount, and I’m still trying to figure out how to make it work. Apparently is a consolkit problem… I’ll write another post about the xfce4 + awsome setup soon…
Today I’ve also started playing with the finger print reader. It seems working, but I haven’t managed yet to use it in conjunction with pam for authentication … more to come.
And… On last closing remark : during the last 5 months I’ve used a dell latitude e6410 … Gosh. I feel I’m on anther planet. The keyboard of a thinkpad give you pleasure, not pain, from 2 to 4G of RAM is a big jump and from a conventional HD to a SSD … well… it seems I’m flyinggggg :) I’ve the impression my productivity just went up 50% !!!
If you work with your laptop everyday get a good laptop. It is well worth the investment …
Update
Now debian can be installed on this model using the stock installation images.