Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon support
I just received a Lenovo X1 Carbon and installing Ubuntu 12.10 (64bit) then everything works out of the box without any tweaks, except for two minor things:
- Finger print reader
- Mute button for microphone
Everything else seems to work very well, including the WiFi and SD card reader. The laptop is amazingly light, runs very quite as it rarely gets that hot and the fan is very quiet on the one occasion it did come on (after several hours of video playback).
I have the i7 version with 8Gb RAM and a 180 Gb SSD. The laptop is very fast and Ubuntu desktop is incredibly responsive.
I am writing my experiences with this new laptop in detail on my blog: http://jr0cket.co.uk/tags/lenovo/
Thank you.
John.
This is the official list of Ubuntu certified hardware from Ubuntu.com's own certification program. It's possible that other vendors may provide their own certification that is separate.
The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is on the list, but for "pre-installed systems only".
That is, this laptop is available in some countries with Ubuntu pre-installed, and Ubuntu is officially certified for use on this laptop only if it is one of those pre-installed ones.
They say:
Standard images of Ubuntu may not work at all on the system or may not work well, though Canonical and computer manufacturers will try to certify the system with future standard releases of Ubuntu.
There are additional notes too. Check it out:
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201204-10913/
That said, just because Ubuntu is not certified doesn't mean it won't work. Ubuntu is intended to run on as much hardware as possible, especially traditional PC desktops and laptops.
I've installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 64-bit on my X1 Carbon. Smooth installation, everything is working fine, except this:
Fingerprint Reader (not working at all)
WI-FI card : sometimes it does not work after suspend/resume. This problem seems to be common for Ubuntu and there exists a fix here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2004690
If the Fingerprint Reader can be fixed, the system will be perfect.
Updates: I've got some freezes with the system so I decided to try Ubuntu 12.10 32-bit, as I do not really need the 64 bit version. Everything works great: no need to fix WIFI after resume as there is no problem; and no more freezes. Guess that 32 bit version supports this machine much better. I did not try finger reader though.