Hi all,
I am considering getting a lenovo thinkpad x220. Has anyone recent (I mean a few last months) experience with that toy? I have looked for various ubuntu distros, seems like all of them have some glitches, but what about most recent (pre)releases of 11.10? Any other which works well and offers good battery life?

Thinkpads are great! I have a five or six year old T41 and it's a tank, and I found it pretty easy to set up with Slackware and had no issues with Ubuntu either. I use the Trackpoint "eraserhead" and even that was detected by default (well, for Slackware I had to uncomment a line in one of the config files).

I haven't kept up to date with Ubuntu, but I would think that if the stable releases of Ubuntu have glitches as you say, then surely a pre-release would have more.

Are you familiar with ThinkWiki? You can find pretty detailed installation and configuration procedures there for a lot of the particular machines, and a lot of them are also semi-reviews. They'll tell you where they had trouble and such. Here's an article on installing Natty on an X220 for example.

I see you have experience with Debian. Why not that? Being a slimmer distro I would expect it to have fewer glitches than Ubuntu.

Hey mate, i got my lenovo x220 probably 2 months back, with windows 7. Windows 7 seemed to run good on it, but i've removed windows 7 now and now run Debian, Slackware and have a free partition i test other distros on. Each distro i've tested runs great. I upgrade the kernel to 2.6.39, and then suspend to ram works great. Desktop effects work out of the box for all distros except Debian and Mepis, but that's an easy fix by editing the xorg.conf file or upgrading xorg. i have the 9 cell battery and can get just over 6 hours from her. Lenovo claimed 12 hours (i think it was) but i never believe what the sellers say, they're usually complete bs: i don't think windows would have got much more. Lastly, because it doesn't have a cd drive, unetbootin has worked well for me, but i ended up buying an external cd drive and it works great.
I don't use Ubuntu, but have looked at there documentation,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/X220

thought it might interest you.

Hi,

received my X220 just yesterday. Throw Ubuntu 11.10 onto it and everything seems to work (graphics, sound, suspend-to-ram) so long. 6cell battery gives me about 4hr. However, I have heard it did better using one of the older kernels. Plan to upgrade 12.04 later.

I am not too happy with oneiric, spent 4hrs and still not figured out how to launch my .xsession ...

what do you mean, i've tried mint which is practically the same thing based on oneiric and it worked perfectly.

Errr....AFAIK there is no mint based on 11.10 yet. All the current mint releases are based on 11.04 or earlier (apart from the 'debian editions')

What I mean? I am using a lot old unix stuff (latex, programming, emacs...). Some of these programs need certain environmental variables set up which I do in ~/.bash_profile. I also prefer to use fvwm as my window manager as I want to have window title bars on side, on top -- to preserve the precious vertical pixels. Previously I could select Xsession from gdm login menu. Not with the new lightdm (at least I haven't figured out how).

It also lacks a sort of "foolproof" login option like "safe gnome" or "safe xterm" for those who messed up their .profile (as I did ;-).

But the computer rocks (with 8G memory + 80GB SSD :-)

Just to update.

I can use xsession with gdm. So I will stick with that at least for now.

Everything seem to work out of the box, including wifi, graphics (including 3D), suspend to ram, brightness and volume buttons.

I haven't checked RGB out.

Battery gives about 4hrs, I have seen reviews where they sqeeye 7hr out of the same battery. I will wait for a new kernel, eventually with 12.04.

OH, woops, that would be my mistake, confused 11.10 with 11.04. Oh well.

@ otomet
Is there any reason why you want to use Ubuntu? Just thinking, if it's not to your satisfaction, you can always switch distros.

Hey guys. I got mine a week ago and I love that device already. Unfortunately battery life is pretty short with 4 hours as compared to Windows.

I installed hdaps and tried tp-smapi but setting battery thresholds does not work on my system (LMDE 11). My second drawback is that hibernate will not work, can you confirm that?

Lastly, processor (i3-2310) temperature is constantly around 50°C. Can someone give me a reference from usage under Windows, because to me that seems pretty warm.

50C does sound like a bit; how can you tell this, as i'd like to see if mine is the same? As for the hibernate, yeah i just tested mine on Debian with 2.6.39 kernel, and it fails to hibernate too. I never use suspend to disk so i'd never noticed that before. The link i posted in the third post says something about suspend having issues on the i7 model, which mine is: i'd like to hear if anyone with the i5 models has it working.

Mine (i3) shows +55C and fan1 does 2900rpm (on AC right now).

I cannot get hibernate to work. However I configure the buttons with dconf-editor, I get suspend instead of hibernate. Any experience? As I use custom x-session, I do not have power menu either (can you get power menu without launching gnome-session?).

Why I use ubuntu? This is a little like infrastucture question for me. I have many computers around, most of them with 10.04, and I am sort of reluctant to switch a single one to something else. But perhaps I should give Debian a try again...

I like Debian but that's just me, as Debian suits my needs. I also like Slackware, but prefer Debian as i like automatic dependency resolution, and my girlfriend already complains about me being on the computer to much, so when i have to compile packages, that doesn't help either. Got a bit off track there, but my point was supposed to be, try many distros and you can then find the best one for you, i'm sure you know.
How do you find out what temperature your computer is running at?

You can use gkrell or other system monitors which you find in the repos to show temperature etc.

Right now mine shows 48°C (going up) and 2900 rpm for the fan (skype, rhythmbox, chromium, thunderbird running). The notebook is connected to AC with an external display in use. It feels pretty warm when I touch the bottom or the palm rests which is most probably due to the fact that lots of things have been crammed into very limited space. I never really cared too much about the temperature with my previous notebooks but seeing that I have the low spec version it now bugs me a little.

My Kernel version is 3.0 btw.

I'm considering moving to Win7 if temperatures are significantly lower there!

References regarding temperature:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series...es/td-p/459717

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series...ad/td-p/464587

50ish seems to be okay.[COLOR="Silver"]