Comments on: Hands On with Thinkpad X200s and Debian Squeeze

By: Jose Miguel

Jose Miguel — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:27:12 +0000

Hi, how did you perform the debian squeeze install? Did you use a usb dvd external unit or a usb stick image? if so, where did you get that image?

Thanks.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:15:40 +0000

Yes, it is a matte screen.

By: Jeffrey W. Baker

Jeffrey W. Baker — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:04:18 +0000

Hi John, this is very helpful. Can you confirm that the high-res screen is indeed matte? Lenovo doesn’t mention it anywhere in their X200s spec sheet.

I routinely get 5.5 hours of battery from the 9-cell in my X61 Tablet, so I would expect to get considerably more in the X200s. At least 7 hours I would think.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:01:38 +0000

I got the Intel 5300.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:01:22 +0000

Yes, I did get a high-res screen. The SSD is from Toshiba, and seems to perform well, but lacks TRIM.

By: vvill

vvill — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:15:48 +0000

I thought I was doing a default install when I just hit [enter] at the d-i boot prompt or choose gui-install from the installer menu.
Third times a charm? After reading your post and re-installing Lenny on a Toshiba 1200-S212, I wondered if I’d found the boot option you used… I was asked “3 iirc” questions. Than “everything” (including things I’d never had installed before) installed…
Plus I had the volitile repo added as well, another first for me….
I’m continually amazed by Debian info I thought I knew, only to find out I really didn’t know as well as I imagined..
Is a mere “Thank You” sufficient here?

By: Christopher Browne

Christopher Browne — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:32:49 +0000

Hear, hear!

I recently picked up an off-lease Thinkpad T43, and decided to give Debian a shot after having used Ubuntu for a couple other laptop installs of late.

I was extremely pleased by the process. I have long been part of the group that was reasonable comfortable with the notion of Debian being “not completely trivial” to install. I rather enjoyed the “Clueless users are bad for debian” essay! :-)

The T43 install went exceedingly cleanly, and every bit of hardware that I’ve tried has worked fine. I initially had some pains with sound – discovered that the buttons to control the speaker worked eminently well. (I had been accustomed to fighting with alsamixergui in the past.)

I wound up having to do a reinstall because I picked some evidently horrible filesystem choices (some of the MD / logical volume stuff that’s really pointless on a laptop), and upgraded it to the point of not working, but an hour of installation work later, all was happy again.

Ubuntu’s “fabled” for being easy to install, but Debian’s installation process has improved enough that there really seems to be some “fable” (as in “entertaining, but false tale”) to the “ease” of Ubuntu.

My worst problem was really that some of the T43 instructions hiding out there predate some of the modern kernel work, and suggested much tougher Wifi configuration efforts than “modern Linux” actually mandates. Can’t complain too much about things being *easier* than documented!

By: solrize

solrize — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:03:00 +0000

Forgot to ask–which wifi card do you have? I thought some of them didn’t need proprietary firmware.

By: solrize

solrize — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:00:36 +0000

John, which screen did you get? The high res one, I hope. Also what kind of SSD is it? I think the Intel X25-M is still the best bet.

I also have an X40 that I’ve been thinking of upgrading to an X200s, but the X200s is a little wider and may not fit in my waist pack the same way. So I’m also looking into the X100e which is smaller, on the idea that it’s a secondary machine anyway.

By: Hands On with Thinkpad X200s and Debian Squeeze | Debian-News.net - Your one stop for news about Debian

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:58:41 +0000

[...] purchasing the Thinkpad X200s. It arrived a few days ago, so here are some first impressions. More here I was very impressed. Squeeze will make an awesome desktop OS. Everything worked perfectly out of [...]

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:42:06 +0000

XMonad with Gnome is great! It’s what I use on my X40. I wonder if an X200s is what I should replace my X40 with. I’m thinking of springing for a new laptop after I graduate in June.

By: Greg Grossmeier

Greg Grossmeier — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:28:51 +0000

I too just received my X200s. Great machine!

Regarding your fresh install of Squeeze: I did a fresh install of Lucid and in doing so finally figured out how to (quite simply) transfer an existing offlineimap Maildir to a new machine. This saved having to re-download about 6 gigs of email.

http://blog.grossmeier.net/2010/01/28/new-laptop-setting-up-email/

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:57:06 +0000

Did you end up using a discount on the x200s?

By: X Y

X Y — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:53:24 +0000

powertop is an awesome powersaving buddy to run. It’ll tell you a lot.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:17:51 +0000

Let me get a bit more specific, after looking at it a bit more:

My battery is now at 80% on the 6-cell, and gnome-power-manager is estimating 4.5 hours left. That means about 5.6 hours on a full charge. I think the 7-hour estimate was a bit optimistic as I had just unplugged it.

This is with BT on, display mostly bright, wifi on, no SATA power-saving tweaks or anything. But again, with more tweaks, I can get it down farther.

thinkwiki has some tips on saving power as well as reports of power consumption at min brightness that you might wish to compare to.

The 9-cell of course has better life, but it adds some weight and size to the unit and I prefer not to use it unless I must.

By: Lars Wirzenius

Lars Wirzenius — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:48:58 +0000

Interesting. Then there’s definitely something wrong with Ubuntu (or the way I installed it) on X200s. I will have to try Debian on it when I get a free day and find a place with sufficient bandwidth.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:46:15 +0000

It’s estimating 7 hours on the 6-cell and a bit more on the 9 with wifi on and display a bit down from max brightness. I haven’t tried to completely discharge it yet. I can get power draw in the neighborhood of 7-8W pretty easily: dimming the display a bit more, shutting off BT. I have done no tweaking besides the default yet.

By: Andres Salomon

Andres Salomon — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:57:51 +0000

The x200s is what I replaced my many x40s with. I tried multiple other laptops (including an x60s and x61s); they all sucked. The x200s was the only one that made me happy.

By: Identity is for chumps

Identity is for chumps — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:30:47 +0000

$ cat .gnomerc
export WINDOW_MANAGER=${HOME}/bin/xmonad

Works for me in ubuntu.

By: Lars Wirzenius

Lars Wirzenius — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:46:28 +0000

John, so how much battery time do you get?

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:29:28 +0000

Yes, I got the 128MB SSD. I am somewhat disappointed that it’s a Toshiba model without support for TRIM, however.

By: BMeph

BMeph — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:03:10 +0000

Do you have a profile on the computer? Especially: did you spring for the SSD?

By: Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:49:23 +0000

Shameless plug: you might be interested in http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2009/04/xmonad_+_gnome_on_Debian/ (second sections). If you use it and find something out dated, I’d be glad to hear.

BTW, nice review of the x200, as a very very happy owner of an x300, I’m happy to see its litter brother fly.