In December 2008 I purchased a Lenovo IdeaPad U330.
I bought this specific model because quite a few modern laptops aren't exactly portable anymore -- they're bulky widescreen overweight beasts. The IdeaPad series is built to be lightweight (<5 pounds) and low power to make for good battery life. I bought it from my local MicroCenter in Chicago for $1300. The closest competitor in the store was a Sony for about $1800 which was also an ultra-light model.
Upon purchase I didn't allow Vista to see the light of day and installed GNU/Linux on it. I've been too tired too maintain Gentoo on my machines in the past year, so I'm trying on Ubuntu for style.
I'm slightly regretting not installing Vista. I would never want to use it, but it seems Lenovo's BIOS updates are run from Windows. So I'm going to have to install Windows somewhere (probably on a spare hard drive or a USB stick if I can manage it.)
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Hardware Details
- Intel Core2 Duo P7350 @ 2 GHz
- 3GB Memory
- 250GB disk
- ATI Switchable Graphics with:
- ATI Radeon HD 3400
- Intel Something (haven't used yet)
- Lenovo EasyCam 1.3M camera
- Intel ICH9 HD audio
- ATI RV620 device (haven't used yet)
- Intel PRO/Wireless 5100
- USB, Firewire, SD card reader
I'm working on compatibility for a few things with GNU/Linux.
Out of the box
I did a network install of Ubuntu 8.10 which worked fine to get me a text console. Then I learned a bit more about switchable graphics and learned that I need to manually switch it in the BIOS as it requires special (Vista-only) drivers to use it in switchable mode. In the BIOS I have two options: "Switchable Graphics" or "Discrete Graphics". Selecting discrete mode makes the ATI card appear native, and the xorg-radeon drivers work fine to get me a fully working desktop. Network, wireless, USB, suspend all work out of the box on GNU/Linux.
Switchable Graphics
Compatibility status: fail, workaround
Apparently this type of hardware has been around for a while now by both nVidia and ATI. Google searches tell me that it requires special drivers to work in switchable mode and that no one has written anything like this for Linux [yet.] Supposedly some Sony laptops running nVidia chips have a third option in the BIOS to select the integrated video card which gives power savings over the nicer card. My laptop does not have this option.
I've booted the laptop into switchable mode and probed a bit. lspci shows both video cards. I tried specifying manual Device sections in an xorg.conf to force a driver to find the card, but no luck (whatsoever.) I'll put more info here sooner and raise this on the xorg development lists and see if anyone else has worked on this.
In the mean time I'm running solely on the ATI card which unnecessarily wastes a bit of power. I want to get the Intel graphics to work because I rarely deal in anything other than 2D applications.
Web Cam (Lenovo EasyCam)
Compatibility status: work in progress
At first, V4L programs like Ekiga did not detect the device. I fished in further.
The camera is a USB Video Class device. A bit of research shows the Linux UVC project should cover this. UVC was committed to the mainstream kernel in 2.6.26 and Ubuntu 8.10 runs 2.6.27.x. The device is detected and shown in dmesg, but no /dev/video? device is created. I later rmmod and modprobe the uvcvideo module which then properly detects the device and creates the /dev/video0 device, but testing with luvcvideo program fails to work and dmesg shows the error:
uvcvideo: Failed to query (130) UVC control 1 (unit 0) : 2 (exp. 26).
I continued pursuing the latest UVC code and tried running a self-compiled 2.6.28 kernel which did not help, but I then grabbed the bleeding-edge sources from UVC mercurial repo (revision 9904,) compiled and loaded videodev and uvcvideo from the compiled copy, and I have video! The picture is inverted, but it's close. From a few sources I've read that this is a common issue and can be worked around with using a parameter on insmod and I'll post these results to the UVC list soon.
Keyboard double-presses
The keyboard is a full-size keyboard which makes me happy. But I'm having one issue: sometimes I'm getting double key-presses. Irregularly, vim foo actually comes out as vimm foo. I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or a software issue, but I'm a solid typist and confident that this isn't just shaky hands.
Comments
I've used lots of other things that Just Worked and aren't mentioned here. CD burning worked out of the box. Wireless & ethernet with NetworkManager work fine. USB works fine of course. Audio works now that I've found the checkbox which toggles back and forth between headphones and speakers.