Fedora 20 Beta on Thinkpad T440s Report
by havoc
Before buying a T440s I kept asking people on Twitter to tell me how it works with Linux, so I figure I should write down the answer.
Note: this is a beta distribution on a brand-new laptop model.
Punchline: Lenovo’s new clickpad is worse than the old physical buttons for me with the trackpoint, but I find it usable. YMMV. If you’re a touchpad user then the clickpad is probably an upgrade from older Thinkpads. The rest of the laptop is mostly solid, but has a couple of bugs, not suprising for brand-new hardware and a Fedora beta. I like the hardware a lot, other than wanting my trackpoint buttons back.
Details:
Clickpad
- The clickpad is not configured to have middle/right click out of the box, fortunately the installer only needs left click. Bug report
- To configure the middle/right button areas with synclient you need to use undocumented options. Bug report
- Disabling touchpad in the BIOS seems to be useless (also turns off clicking so trackpoint has no buttons).
- I also set PalmDetect, HorizHysteresis, VertHysteresis to prevent accidental mouse motion.
- With the trackpoint, the issue is that you will occasionally click the wrong mouse button.
- It may be my imagination, but I think the line between the soft buttons may move depending on whether you last touched the pad on the right or left side of the line, or something. I am mostly used to it now but I think it could be a showstopper for people who are picky. It makes it very hard to configure the soft buttons to match the physical affordances on the touchpad. Whatever is going on, there could be something the synaptics driver could do to reduce clicking on the wrong button, because I can’t seem to configure the soft buttons to always be where I expect them to be. (Update: maybe the confusing thing when trying to experimentally configure the button areas is that it tries to ignore motion once the click begins so looks at where your finger first touched down? But this would also make it hard to feel around for the middle button bumps and then click. Anyway, with a ruler, the middle button affordance is from 40% to 60% on the physical touchpad, so I’m going to try
Option "SoftButtonAreas" "60% 0 0 0 40% 60% 0 0".) - I want a mode where the touchpad has clickpad-clicking and two-finger scroll (or other gestures) but NO pointer motion and NO tap to click. Synaptics doesn’t seem to have a way to have scrolling without pointer motion.
- At one point my touchpad got into a mode where it had one-finger scrolling and no pointer motion, but it went away on reboot and I don’t know how to reproduce it.
- Despite the issues it’s still better than having to use a touchpad. Trackpoint forever!
Network
- I ordered with the Intel wifi card (strongly recommended for Linux) and it works great. I installed over wifi in fact.
- The ethernet card picks 10 mb/s instead of 1000 on my network. Since my wifi is fast this isn’t bothering me much but if I needed ethernet it would be pretty bad. Bug report
- Not sure if it’s the card or something more general, but wired autoconnect was disabled by default. Bug report
Docking
- All screens blank when you dock with a monitor connected to the dock. This would be a showstopper if I needed to use an external monitor. Bug report (anyone know which module the logic to adjust xrandr on monitor plug/unplug lives in?)
- Dock ethernet works the same as non-dock ethernet (i.e. broken, but in the same way).
- Dock power seems to work fine.
Physical
- Nice size and weight. Power brick is smaller than pre-Haswell Thinkpads too.
- Screen is pretty (I got the 1080p one). Pixels are small, text is tiny without tweaking.
- I think the new keyboard is fine or even better than the old Thinkpad style. Probably less prone to getting gooped up too.
- Home/End/PgUp/PgDn moved again but I think they’ve moved every time I bought a new Thinkpad so I’m used to it.
- I don’t care about lack of dedicated volume buttons and lack of status LEDs but some people don’t like that in the new Thinkpads.
- Battery life (with the internal 3-cell and a removable 3-cell) seems to be 4-6 hours depending on what you are doing, and how many powertop tunables you toggle. I haven’t rigorously tested.
- I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive. This was pretty difficult (it requires a spudger or thin blade, I used a plastic scraper). Maybe the price of a thin laptop that feels solid.
- The factory drive had a protective sheet wrapped around it to separate it from the case, so a little worried my replacement drive might short out against the case or something. But seems to be working so far.
Other
- Minor cosmetic artifact in gnome-shell, not something you’ll care about. Bug report
- It comes with a 16G SSD designed to be a cache for the main HD. This shows up in Linux but I’m not using it. I was thinking of using it as a boot disk but just didn’t bother yet. Linux only has experimental support for the caching trick. I might rather put a larger SSD in the slot and use it as a non-cache, but SSDs in this form factor aren’t widely available yet.
- Default fonts are too small on the high-DPI screen and GNOME has the configuration for this only in tweak tool. OS X puts this config in their tweak tool too, but my guess is that they have better defaults on all of their hardware.
- Adjusting fonts upward doesn’t affect web sites. Firefox has no “just automatically zoom all pages by N steps” setting that I can figure out. Text is too small on most sites.
- Powertop doesn’t have the obvious “make all these tunings persistent” button (or more importantly, the tunables are not properly tuned by default).
- Switching wifi networks involves 3 more clicks than it used to. I have an upstairs and a downstairs one so I do this a lot.
- GNOME 3.10 feels extremely solid and smooth. Fedora install was seamless with no troubles. Overall it was an easy upgrade and I was back to productivity after a day; most of the time was spent copying over my data.
Thanks to all the developers involved! Great hardware and software upgrade from my T510/F17, overall.
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I’m running F20 beta on my Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus. To make Firefox scale automatically I change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2.0 in about:config. I’m surprised you had to use the tweak tool for GNOME system fonts, scaling on my laptop just works.
Curious what you mean by “scaling just works” – I don’t see any scaling settings at all ? you mean you change the resolution to a non-native one or is there a DPI setting hiding somewhere?
GNOME 3.10 has an early implementation of apple-style hidpi support which kicks in if your display is dense enough. yours is probably just under the threshold. it’s being adjusted to never kick in unless resolution is at least 2000px in one dimension too, as we’ll likely hit too many false positives at 1080p, and pixel doubled 1080p is a bit too low to be practical.
I’m running Gnome on a 1080p laptop screen @ 13 inches… For Firefox I resorted to using the NoSquint add on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nosquint/
I use a T431s with Fedora 20, it has the same kind of trackpad with no buttons. I saw your bug report about the SoftButtonArea, but using only that you will probably move your mouse when you intend to click with your thumb. And it is quite anoying having your thumb fight your indexfinger about the pointer. The solution I fount to this was to set AreaTopEdge.
This is the configuration I use:
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/55-synaptics.conf
Section “InputClass”
Identifier “Clickpad buttons”
MatchDriver “synaptics”
Option “SoftButtonAreas” “66% 0 0 50% 33% 65% 0 50%”
Option “AreaTopEdge” “2621”
EndSection
thanks! I have to mess with this more.
You could use the 16GB internal SSD as a swap partition, that’s what I do with mine on my Asus UX32VD (replaced the HDD that comes with it with an SSD).
Interesting idea – with 12G ram I’m maybe rarely going to swap though, unless something is leaking memory and then I sort of want it to crash instead of swapping anyway 🙂
support for the caching stuff is actually supposed to be an f20 feature, but I have to admit we haven’t really tested it…
Hi, for the font problem in Firefox, you can try to set minimum font size.
If you’re just in DPI settings, on the Arch wiki there is some advice:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Tweaks#Configure_the_DPI_value
You can set font.minimum-size.x-western to for example 14 in about:config to get a minimum font size in Firefox.
This setting is even in the UI but I guess I don’t want to potentially distort pages that use small fonts for a reason, just want a larger default zoom. That dpi option might be what I’m looking for I guess.
Powertop 2.5 has a new –auto-tune cmdline option, it will launch powertop, set all the tunes and exit.It went into the F20 package repo about a week ago.
Useful, thanks! Now to make the distribution run that on boot by default 🙂 of course using good judgment to avoid tunings that won’t make sense for most people, and maybe auto adjusting tunings according to AC power…
Regarding two WiFi networks, if you set your SSID to the same value for both APs, then your system should auto-switch between the two (or more) APs. Kind of the whole point. Use different, non-overlapping channels on each AP.
http://superuser.com/questions/122441/how-can-i-get-the-same-ssid-for-multiple-access-points
> Adjusting fonts upward doesn’t affect web sites. Firefox has no “just automatically zoom all pages by N steps” setting that I can figure out. Text is too small on most sites.
—
Have a look at layout.css.devPixelsPerPx
Thanks so much for posting this; I had been keeping an eye open (rather nervously) for reports on Linux-on-T440s compatibility, as I was expecting mine any day. It just arrived, in fact, and it’s so awesome to be able to follow in your footsteps and read your bug reports… should make things relatively easy. Definitely seems like it will be a nice step up from my trusty old T400!
“I want a mode where the touchpad has clickpad-clicking and two-finger scroll (or other gestures) but NO pointer motion and NO tap to click. Synaptics doesn’t seem to have a way to have scrolling without pointer motion.”
I would LOVE to see that as well. I think this is software limitation in the linux synaptics driver, but it was beyond my capabilities to improve it last time I checked.
To set powertop tuneables, use TLP.
http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html
I was abvle to have the trackpad disabled but still work for multitouch and clicks on my t431s using:
# Devide the clickpad into 3 areas for left/middle/right click
xinput set-prop 10 “Synaptics Soft Button Areas” 3477, 5112, 0, 0, 2659, 3476, 0, 0
# Disable mouse movements
xinput set-prop 10 “Device Accel Constant Deceleration” 9999999
# Disable tap events
xinput set-prop 10 “Synaptics Tap Action” 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Oh hey, I decided to try and boot back into Windows after a week and it fails miserably. I used Anaconda’s “reclaim space” option and am booting in UEFI mode, which, as it turns out, is _not_ supported in the F20 final criteria: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_20_Final_Release_Criteria#windows-dual-boot
Are you dual-booting, and if so, in UEFI mode with secure boot still enabled?
I’m looking at https://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/32642/dual-boot-windows-8-and-fedora-19/ and wondering if something like the Grub2 manipulation is in my future. I don’t use Windows often, but it’s nice to have the option…
I never booted windows past the first screen of its setup – I just pulled the original hard drive and put in a new faster one and installed fedora on there.
I did end up turning off UEFI secure boot because for the ethernet bug mentioned I installed a rawhide kernel and it wouldn’t secure boot. But secure boot was working for the regular kernel for me.
Thanks. It turns out that the UEFI menu (accessible from hitting at boot time and choosing a different device to boot from) works, but otherwise it looks like relevant details on the bug can be found at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=986731 (carried over from ancient F19 times).
Hi there, I also have the T440s and am struggling with the right settings for the PalmDetect option. The Clickpad is in a position that I always tend to rest my left Palm on it and so I often get unwanted clicks and movement. Can you please tell me the settings you are using so I have something to start with? Thank you in advance.
Following Steven Harms’s suggestion above, I added a startup command in gnome-tweak-tool (can also drop a .desktop in .config/autostart) with:
xinput set-prop 10 ‘Device Accel Constant Deceleration’ 9999999
that turns off motion events, which makes palm detect sort of irrelevant. I still do accidentally *click* sometimes with my palm (actually press down on the pad).
I haven’t tried Mattias Eriksson’s AreaTopEdge up above yet but maybe we should.
In my xorg.conf I have:
Section “InputClass”
Identifier “touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
MatchIsTouchpad “on”
# button 3 Left, Right, Top, Bottom
# button 2 Left, Right, Top, Bottom
# percents are coordinates not sizes
# 0 = to the edge
Option “SoftButtonAreas” “60% 0 0 0 40% 60% 0 0”
Option “HorizHysteresis” “250”
Option “VertHysteresis” “250”
Option “PalmDetect” “1”
EndSection
This is actually sort of wrong; while 60/40 are the correct positions using a ruler to measure, they don’t seem to work right. I think this may be because LeftEdge/RightEdge are wrong by default but I haven’t had a chance to work it out. Anyway so right now I have to click on the right side of my middle button to get a middle click.
Thank you for the promt answer. I didn’t realize, that you are using the pad only for clicking. I use it for scrolling and pointing as well which doesn’t let me turn it off entirly. I found a “solution” for my problem, which is using
AreaLeftEdge=1800
This disables a part of the Pad (not for real clicks thou). For now it seems to work just fine. Will take a few days until I can say more.
With my settings, two-finger scrolling does work, but you can’t use the touchpad to move the mouse pointer.
Thanks for your report.
Do you have the backlit keyboard working? It’s apparently toggled by Fn-Space, but there’s no response to that key combo on mine.
I never even booted it once to Windows to check, so I’m hoping this isn’t a hardware issue — the best I can tell this should work independent of the OS.
Another annoying bug (which is definitely a software bug) is that wheel emulation is not working with soft buttons. So you can’t hold down middle button and use the trackpoint to scroll as previously.
Fn+Space does work for me, I don’t think I changed anything. I do stay in FnLk mode most of the time (Fn+Esc), but trying just now, Fn+Space seems to work both with FnLk and without.
Confirmed that middle-mouse scroll with trackpoint doesn’t work. I never got in the habit of using that so I didn’t notice it missing, but trying just now, it doesn’t seem to work here on T440s.
Thanks — it seems I may have dud hardware 🙁
I’ll boot Fedora 20 on a live USB, just in case something Ubuntu has done has caused this — but I doubt it, I think this is entirely BIOS/hardware related.
Self-reply — I’m an idiot. The on sale version I got doesn’t come with a backlit keyboard. I didn’t realise this was a removeable option.
In any case, this doesn’t worry me. At least I know the H/W is functioning as designed in this case.
So the bugs I’d really like fixed:
– Wheel emulation with soft buttons. If this was working then the clickpad probably wouldn’t worry me much at all.
– Docking with external display. The patch for this is a WIP, so I would expect it fixed rather soon.
Also, try upgrading to kernel 3.12. The power saving for Haswell seems much better, and I’m getting a couple more hours life. I’m using Ubuntu with Linux 3.12, TLP and all PowerTop tuning items set. I can usually work without worry for 5+ hours now.