Comments on: Debian Squeeze on a ThinkPad X201

By: antiquity

antiquity — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:26:53 +0000

Hi, Michael,
I did a stupid thing before I am reading your article. I did over write the MBR after I made the factory recovery disks. But when I again want to restore Win 7, the rescue and recovery works at the beginning. But it soon says the recovery has been finished before actually doing anything. The whole local drive is still there intact.
Do you have any suggestions about the next I can do? Thanks.

By: romje

romje — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:47:19 +0000

You’re right Michael, with my VAIO I fine tuned the battery usage using powertop , laptop-mode and all other tools … I hope that the SSD drive will contribute to get a low power consumption… I should receive my machine next week so more coming soon…

Thanks
jerome

By: michael

michael — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:28:12 +0000

My X201 has an i5 M520, so it’s not an exact comparison, but using a default Debian Gnome install, banging away on all my normal activity, with the screen 2 ticks down from full brightness (which is where I normally keep it), I get about 4 hours on my 9-cell battery. If I disable everything possible in powertop and crank the screen down to barely readable, I can probably get another 30-45 minutes.

The amazing numbers that OEMs give for battery life (and most other numbers..) are usually contrived.. proc scaled all the way down, disk parked, fan off or barely running, all radios disabled, screen off, running DOS 6.22, with a stopwatch that just happens to run a little fast..

By: romje

romje — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:26:54 +0000

Thanks for your reply Michael…
Just a small question more, what is the average autonomy seen with your laptop ?
lenovo seems to be proud to announce 9-11hours with a 9 cells battery on the X201 with i7 620M processor … It sounds fantastic and far more superior than the one seen with my VAIO with the same processor (about 4 hours maximum)

Regards
Jerome

By: michael

michael — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:26:34 +0000

Hi Jerome – just use the disk tool of your choice

By: romje

romje — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:55:15 +0000

Hi Michael,
I’m about receiving the same maachine, I will follow your wise advice and not installing grub on the MBR (I encountered many problems with GRUB install on MBr with my previous VAIO laptop).What tool did yoy use to resize the partition ? I will get a 256Gb SSD and I wondered about using Microsoft proprietary tools , or tools made for Windows or using the good old gparted as a live disk ?

Thanks for your reply
Kind regards
jerome

By: michael

michael — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:05:08 +0000

I added an update to the post:

Note #2 Update: linux-2.6 version 2.6.32-19 was uploaded to unstable 2010-08-05 – this kernel image is working well for me and none of the configuration changes to get vesa working should be necessary.

By: michael

michael — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:37:04 +0000

(that formatting is not going to appear correctly.. sorry about that) I have seen this patch, and I’m not currently in need of accelerated graphics, but thanks for the patch note. As I mentioned in the last little bit – Intel and Linus need to get this chipset working correctly in the vanilla kernel, then it will trickle down to the distributions, etc.. I’ve had similar issues with fglrx and new ATI chipsets, nvidia, etc.. over the years – it will get fixed upstream, and I’m perfectly happy not maintaining my own patched kernel – vesa is working great for everything I need so far.

By: Jt Loni

Jt Loni — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:31:31 +0000

good job. I went as well through these troubles with Sqeeze installation on x201.
for the Grub issue, after installation I’ve just upgraded Grub (I use version 2)

regarding display: the vesa driver doesn’t perform well. so my recommendation is to get kernel 2.6.34, then change /usr/src/linux-2.6.34.1/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
find line 884 and replace
int err_most = (target >> + (target >> 10);
by
int err_most = (target >> + (target >> 9);

—————–Extract from my current kernel
bool found;
/* approximately equals target * 0.00488 */
int err_most = (target >> + (target >> 9); *****HERE REPLACE 10 by 9*****
found = false;

if (intel_pipe_has_type(crtc, INTEL_OUTPUT_LVDS)) {
int lvds_reg;

if (HAS_PCH_SPLIT(dev))
lvds_reg = PCH_LVDS;
else
lvds_reg = LVDS;
if ((I915_READ(lvds_reg) & LVDS_CLKB_POWER_MASK) ==
LVDS_CLKB_POWER_UP)
clock.p2 = limit->p2.p2_fast;
else
clock.p2 = limit->p2.p2_slow;
} else {

so enjoy it (compiz included)..

By: Debian Squeeze on a ThinkPad X201 | Debian-News.net - Your one stop for news about Debian

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:22:26 +0000

[...] The goal here is to have a working ThinkVantage button to access the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery partition, as well as a fully functional Windows 7 and Debian Squeeze dual-boot. The key to this is to not touch the Windows/Lenovo MBR. Do not install Grub to the MBR! More here [...]