laptops

My Thinkpad X200s is playing up, in that it will no longer suspend and sometimes the wireless stops working until I reboot. The suspend issue looks like an issue with the Thinkpad TPM, but that’s meant to be resolved, and I could have sworn it was previously working while I was still running this kernel.

I checked the workaround was enabled (it is). Blacklisting the modules or disabling the Security Chip in the BIOS causes it to sleep, but not wake up. Someone suggested upgrading the BIOS firmware, but I’ve always been wary of doing this, I’ve bricked machines before.

Anyway so that I can put some computation that suspends in my bag, I installed Fedora 15 on the Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 I have. The machine itself is a little slow, but GNOME Shell runs pretty well. The trackpad drivers have improved too. Less weird jumping around and two finger scrolling.

Managed to crash the Fedora installer twice, it crashes when it tries to delete extended DOS partitions (automatically or manually). Had to delete my old Meego-created partition tables by hand for it to work.

Author: Danielle

Danielle is an Australian software engineer, computer scientist and feminist. She doesn't really work on GNOME any more (sadly). Opinions and writing are solely her own and so not represent her employer, the GNOME Foundation, or anyone else but herself.

8 thoughts on “laptops”

  1. My ThinkPad X200s suspends just fine, and I have the TPM disabled in BIOS. Running 3.0-rc6.

  2. I do not know about your bricking past, and I have myself bricked some hardware myself, but the BIOS updates tends to be a lot more stable these days as long as you do not cut the power while flashing.

  3. @Anonymous: yeah, mine worked perfectly, and other people have been able to disable the TPM to work around recent kernel bugs which is what it looks like I’m hitting. I suspect my machine is actually damaged, and something in the TPM is just one of the things that plays up (along with the wireless sometimes failing), but just because of recent kernel regressions it makes you think it might be software.

    I tried an older kernel I had installed, 2.6.35-based, which I remember working, and it still failed. So I think it is the machine.

  4. Hi Denni

    I am sorry to hear that your laptop is giving you problems, I am also thinking of upgrading my laptop to a much bigger and faster one, I am using the samsung N15 netbook, I love it because it easy to carry around but I don’t feel like I can do enough on it so its better I have it as back up. I wish you all the luck in you laptop mission in the future.

  5. My x201 is doing the same thing with wireless. I sometimes have to reboot to get it working again. I don’t know how long this has been happening for certain, but I suspect it was when I upgraded from ubuntu 10.11 to 11.04.
    I can’t comment on suspend because I don’t use it.

  6. I updated the BIOS in the X201 using the bootable image from Lenovo and memdisk. No problems.

  7. Upgrading the BIOS is worth while. Since a lot of the power management and suspend code involves executing ACPI methods and those ACPI methods come from the BIOS tables, upgrading the BIOS could very well fix things.

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia
This work by Danielle Madeley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.