Ubuntu Natty on Lenovo ThinkPad X120e

If you've read my earlier post regarding Maverick on this machine, you'll know I ran into a few annoying issues.

The biggest problem was that my Broadcom wireless driver kept getting deactivated with every reboot, so I decided to try installing Natty instead.

The first issue I ran into with Natty was that the installer kept crapping out before the partitioning phase with an error about ubi-partman failing to start due to error 141. There are a couple of Launchpad bugs filed for this error, but a claimed fix that was checked in a few days earlier did not seem to help things. What fixed me up, though, was using the alternate install image, which uses an ncurses-based installer rather than the fancy Ubiquity installer.

So, moving on, everything installed fine and, upon booting into the new system, the hardware driver manager detected my wireless card and recommended the proprietary Broadcom SLA driver. Click to enable, reboot and wireless should be fine and dandy.

If you opted for the default Ralink card, it should be detected and supported out-of-the-box, without even needing to consult the driver manager.

By default, the system utilizes the open source "radeon" driver, with 3D support provided by the Gallium3D backend. This should be fine for light 3D duties, such as Compiz, though it does have a show-stopping bug that will cause crashes, loops and reboots under heavy stress, such as 3D games. As long as you don't play any games, though, you should be fine. If you want to play games and/or use video decoding acceleration, you'll have to install the proprietary Catalyst driver, but it is not yet compatible with the X Server included in Natty. This will be resolved before final release in April.

Update 3/30/11: The updated proprietary fglrx driver should be available from the Natty repos now.

At this point, my system works pretty well, except for an odd dependency hell issue that is preventing Unity from installing/running because of some Compiz virtual package conflict B.S., though I suspect this will be sorted out in a couple of days. UPDATE (3/23/11): fixed now.

I haven't tried suspend/hibernate yet, but will update with results as soon as possible.

UPDATE (3/23/11): waking from suspend seems fine, though my notification stuff isn't updating (wireless is showing that it's disconnected, even though it's not, etc). Hibernate, in contrast, seems totally b0rked. It just sits there blowing its fan and blinking the sleep LED on the front edge until you do a hard poweroff. :(

UPDATE (4/1/11): To get multitouch working on your trackpad, install the package gsynaptics (not to be confused with the synaptic package manager):

sudo aptitude install gsynaptics

and then type:

gpointing-device-settings

You should be able to enable two-finger scrolling from the trackpad menu. While you're there, you can configure the navigation nub for mousewheel emulation, if that's what you're into.

Everything else I've tested, including audio and webcam, work just fine. Even the function volume keys work.

Things I haven't tested:
HDMI-out
audio over HDMI
VGA-out

The middle scroll button works too, it just takes a little configuration.