Ubuntu Maverick on Lenovo X120e Fusion Laptop

UPDATE 3/23/11: Natty seems to work much better with these systems, so I recommend skipping Maverick and going straight for 11.04, even thought it's still in Alpha stage at the time of this writing. Check out my post about it here.

Original Post:

Due to a wonderful pricing error at Lenovo, I got a really sweet deal on a Thinkpad X120e laptop, featuring AMD's new Zacate Fusion chipset.

When trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on it, though, the Ubiquity installer kept failing with this error:

grub-install efi-dummy failed. This is a fatal error.

To fix this, you need to go into the computer's BIOS and, under the boot tab, change the uEFI settings to try 'legacy' first. This will allow Ubuntu to install grub successfully.

After you make that change, installation should be able to complete and you can reboot into your new system.

That's as far as I've gotten so far, so I'll update this post as I find out more.

Update (3/15/11): I ran into a few more issues that I had to muddle through: wireless networking and waking up after closing the lid of the computer.

First, we'll fix the suspend issue, since it's the easier of the two.

Update 3/23/11: Actually, this doesn't fix anything. It still has problems after a few seconds of having the lid closed (i.e., when it actually goes to sleep). Sorry for any inconvenience. I'll add a real solution if/when I find one.

Open up a terminal and type:

gconf-editor

It will bring up a window with lots of configuration items. Navigate to apps > gnome-power-manager > actions, then change the default entry for sleep_type_battery from 'hibernate' to 'suspend.'

This should get you fixed up.

Now for the tedious one...wireless.

If you have the default Ralink wireless card, for now you'll have to get the driver from the manufacturer's website, build it and install it (download it here). However, the driver *should* work out-of-the-box in Natty.

UPDATE 3/21/11: annoyingly, my system keeps deactivating the driver. I give up on Maverick and have to recommend skipping to Natty instead.

On the recommendation of others, I purchased my machine with the optional Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless card instead of the default Ralink card. Unfortunately, the Broadcom card isn't much better. It uses the 802.11 Linux STA driver, but the device isn't supported by the version available in the official Ubuntu repos. Instead, we'll have to download and install it directly from Broadcom.

To get it going, first you want to download the driver from this page. The drivers are specific to your CPU architecture, so make sure you get the right one. After that, we need to install some prerequisites to build the driver:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Now, we'll navigate to wherever you downloaded the driver (I'm going to assume it's located in the default ~/Downloads directory):

cd ~/Downloads

Decompress the archive:

tar -xvf hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz

and then build and install the driver:

make && sudo make install

The driver is now installed, but we need to activate it and tie up some loose ends. So, still in a terminal, type:

sudo depmod -a

This will fetch all of the dependencies for drivers located in /lib/modules (including our newly installed driver).

Now, we'll make sure no conflicting drivers are in use by typing:

sudo rmmod bcm43xx

sudo rmmod b43

sudo rmmod b43legacy

and then try our new driver out by typing:

sudo modprobe lib80211_crypt_tkip && sudo insmod wl.ko

At this point, your wireless should start working. If it does, we need to make sure conflicting drivers don't start bothering us again by typing:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

and adding these lines:

blacklist b43

blacklist b43legacy

blacklist bcm43xx

Save and exit. Then, back in the terminal, type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and add:

ieee80211_crypt_tkip

at the bottom. Then, type:

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

and add this:

sudo insmod /lib/modules/[whatever your kernel revision is]/wlan/wl.ko

to the end of the file, but before it says "exit 0."

You should be all set at that point. If you need to reverse these steps for whatever reason, just go back through these steps and delete the lines we added.

Last, we'll talk a bit about graphics drivers. The open source drivers do not support our fancy new APU graphics, so we'll have to use the proprietary fglrx driver binary blob from AMD, which you can install through the 'Additional Drivers' applet, located under the System > Administration menus. However, after rebooting, you'll see (at the time of this writing) a translucent black square in the bottom-right corner of your screen that shows an AMD logo and says 'Unsupported hardware.'

This can be avoided by manually installing a newer fglrx driver directly from AMD instead of using the package from the official repos, but that adds its own hassles that I didn't feel like dealing with, such as needing to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. If you would rather go that route, you can find detailed instructions here.

Ubuntu Maverick on VirtualBox

The third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was just released, so I figured I'd give it a shot in the ol' VirtualBox VM.

The Pros: Mouse pointer integration is built-in, so you don't have to deal with reinstalling Guest Additions every time you do a kernel update.

The Cons: Since Maverick started using a new X-Server (1.9), Guest Additions no longer do their acceleration and resolution magic. This includes manually adding resolutions to the xorg.conf, so until something changes, it's 800x600 all the way...

UPDATE (9/30/2010): Looks like the open source edition of VirtualBox has us covered now. Just open up a terminal and type (all one line):

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) ; sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11

Thanks for the tip, Anonymous!

I'm putting this here for my own reference, but if you want to automatically mount your host's shared directory in your Linux guest OS, you can edit /etc/fstab thusly:

[host's name of directory] [mount point] vboxsf defaults 0 0

which, for me, translates to:

vbox_share /media/vbox vboxsf defaults 0 0

No more tedious mounting and no mucking around with startup scripts running as root...

Something else I've encountered, not specific to Maverick, but I figured I'd share it here anyway:

I decided to give BTRFS a shot, so I formatted my partitions with it (it still won't support booting, so I had to make a small boot partition with ext4, but / and /home are BTRFS). Unfortunately, there is a hellacious bug somewhere that causes apt-get update/upgrade to be godawful slow (like, 4 hrs. for a big-but-still-reasonable upgrade) with this FS. However, I came across this blog post that suggests using a patched copy of dpkg, which is available from this ppa, which specializes in BTRFS-optimized packages. To add the PPA, add it to your sources in Synaptic or open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brian-rogers/btrfs

Then just update/upgrade as usual. The package comes with a pretty scary warning about how it can hose your system, so you should take frequent snapshots (that's why you're using BTRFS anyway, right? Right??). Unfortunately, this didn't really fix my problem, so it's back to ext4 for me. :(

Once perk of reinstalling using the latest Beta release package is that I got to check out the new installer. It looks really nice and they've done some really smart things with concurrency whereby it starts installing your system before it asks you all of the time-consuming personalization questions. All in all, installation was easy and fast, fast, fast!

Everything else appears unchanged since Lucid.

I'll update this post as I find anything else out. If anyone has anything to add, feel free to leave a comment.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat on Acer AspireOne

One caveat before you read any further: my AspireOne is old as hell (9" w/ 8GB SSD) and these problems/fixes may not work on newer models.

Ok, now with that out of the way, I've got some good news: Maverick works great on my AO. Installation was fast and painless (it only took around 20 min., I think), and booting is super-quick (something like 15 seconds to a working desktop in my experience). Wireless works out-of-the-box, as does the wifi activity light :O. Unfortunately, the SD card slots are still b0rked. To get them working, we can use the same fix from my previous AO/Ubuntu post:

Open up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Then paste in:

options sdhci debug_quirks=1

Reboot and you should be all set.

I also ran into a problem trying to create shared directories using samba. The system automatically installs the samba packages just fine, but when I try to actually make a share, it fails with the error "Failed to execute child process "testparm" (No such file or directory)." If this problem affects you, too, hop back into your terminal and type:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/testparm.samba3 /usr/bin/testparm ; sudo ln -s /usr/bin/net.samba3 /usr/bin/net

This should get you all fixed up. You don't even need to reboot again.

Some other things to note about this new release:
1. Virtualbox no longer needs Guest Additions installed to utilize mouse pointer integration.
2. The new unity netbook interface sucks. I think the idea of putting the launcher bar on the left is great, and I like the look of it, but I could never track down where they had the gnome-terminal hidden, and it wouldn't show up when I searched for it in their application search applet. Also, hitting Alt+F2 wouldn't bring up the execution prompt, so after a few minutes of frustration, I uninstalled it and went back to the standard interface.

I'm happy to see the improvements they've made in this new release and I look forward to seeing what else comes in before the upcoming feature freeze. If you run into any other problems with this release, drop me a comment and I'll help however I can. Also, keep an eye on my PPA for packages of bsnes v1.0, which should be optimized enough for use on your AspireOne netbook.