Any Thinkpad T420 Users Out There?

[sdewittofm]

I'm running Mint 12 on Lenovo Thinkpad T420 and am interested in other people's experiences. For me, the system runs great although it takes a little tweaking to get some of the Thinkpad specific functions to work (hdaps and fan control in particular). There is also a power issue that needs to be corrected. Those interested in correcting these issues should check out the T420 discussion on the Ubuntu forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1816071). I'm also happy to relate what I did on my system as well.

[AlbertP]

You can use a patched kernel to work around the ASPM bug: http://zinc.canonical.com/~cking/powerm ... x/oneiric/
Note that I don't use a T420. But I have seen more T420 users on the forum.

The laptop exists with nVidia Optimus. It's possible that you can't yet use the nVidia card on such a laptop. In case inxi -Gx reports Intel as GLX Renderer, you can avoid problems by not installing the nVidia driver at all.

[hkbruvold]

I have problem with disabling the touchpad. The shortcut doesn't work. I have gsynaptics and xserver-xorg-input-synnaptics installed, but no change.
Do you also have that problem?

EDIT:
I found a solution.
Run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg-input-synaptics".
Now I can disable touchpad

[rhodry]

I don't personally use the T420, rather a Y570, but certainly at the moment, I would only buy Lenovo laptops because they are the only manufacturer, that I know of, that allow you to TURN OFF the Optimus stuff in the bios.

A lot of new machines with this "feature" allow bios swapping between 'inbuilt' mode and 'Optimus' mode. Lenovo actually allow 'discrete mode only' bios swap as well! Therefore, install Nvidia drivers and works like a charm. Doesn't have to know about the Inbuilt graphics. Mine is a desktop replacement so it is Linux only and connected to power most of the time - couldn't care less about Optimus!!

You know it only requires the builder to spend literally a few cents extra in the build process to allow this!

rhodry

[mortenvp]

For those of you, who wants to use Optimus, now that you've paid for it, try Bumblebee or Ironhide. Both lets you change between graphics manually and works on t420s with Ubuntu.