Tag Archives: fedora

Fedora 20 on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon (20A7)

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Time to try out some new hardware.  My experience so far with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon has been great and will get even better over time.  Most of the things that I’m going to cover in this blog have already been fixed in various projects and I expect that many of them will land in Fedora 21.  However, until that time, I want to make sure that Fedora 20 users can have a great experience with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon (model 20A7), assuming they are willing to tweak a bit.

Step 1 – Disable UEFI Boot for installation

To do an easy install just disable the UEFI Boot in your BIOS and hook up your installation source (USB, PXE over the net, etc).  Very simple to get going.

Step 2 – Fix Suspend / Resume and USB3

Resuming from suspend is going to fail because of a problem with the firmware and the USB3 driver.  You have a couple options.  The first is to disable USB3 in the BIOS and move on.  The second if to update your BIOS which is trickier.  Do not update your BIOS using my instructions unless you know exactly what you are doing.  You can brick (i.e. ruin) your machine if you do it wrong.

Option A (Easy) – Disable USB3 in the BIOS

To do an easy install just disable the UEFI Boot in your BIOS and hook up your installation source (USB, PXE over the net, etc).  Very simple to get going.

As for disabling USB3, there is evidently a USB3 driver problem that keep the machine from un-suspending.  I’m going to investigate updating the BIOS to see if it fixes this, but an easy fix for right now is to disable USB3 and suspend resume works great.

Option B (Danger) – Update your BIOS to version 1.13+ (AT YOUR OWN RISK)

I’ll be honest, I even contemplated as to whether to put these instructions in here.  At the end of the day though, I figure I might as well pass along what worked for me.  Seriously though, if you mess up a BIOS update, you can ruin your machine so if you don’t know what you are doing, just turn off USB3.  However, if you want to update the firmware, this is what I did.

Step 1 – Download the geteltorito.pl script.  You can download the one I used here.

Step 2 – Get a USB drive that can be erased and plug it in.  Figure out which device that drive is.  I usually just run ‘fdisk’ to figure out.  Keep in mind that if you see /dev/sdb1 in fdisk, your device is actually going to be /dev/sdb (with no number at the end).

Step 3 – Download the BIOS ISO image from here.

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE BIOS FOR YOUR MODEL NUMBER LAPTOP.  For example, I downloaded the driver ‘BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows 8.1 (64-bit), 8 (64-bit), 7 (32-bit, 64-bit) – ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Machine types: 20A7, 20A8)‘.  The filename was gruj08us.iso.

Step 4 – Convert the downloaded ISO to a bootable image, named bios-update.iso

perl geteltorito.pl -o bios-update.iso gruj08us.iso

Step 5 – Copy that bootable image to your USB drive.  I’m using /dev/sdx below which you need to replace with your USB device.  Double check that you have the device name right for your USB drive and run:

sudo dd if=bios-update.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=512K
sudo sync

Step 6 – Reboot and press F12 to get the boot menu and boot from the USB.  Follow the instructions to update your BIOS.

Step 3 – Add MattOnCloud Repository

I’ve created a yum repository that contains a RPM that contains various fixes and repositories used in this blog.  I’m keeping the  and pull requests are definitely appreciated.  To install my repository, run:

sudo rpm -Uvh https://files-oncloud.rhcloud.com/yum/RPMS/x86_64/oncloud-repo-0.4-1.fc20.x86_64.rpm

To apply the fixes, then run:

sudo yum install thinkpad-fixes

Step 4 – Update GNOME

Since the Thinkpad Carbon X1 has a very high resolution screen, you are going to want to get GNOME 3.12 HiDPI support.  If you don’t, a lot of the windows and text are going to be crazy small.  My RPM provides a repository to a backported version of GNOME 3.12.  So after installing, you just need to run:

sudo yum update

Go get a coffee since that is going to be a lot of packages.  After it’s done, logout and login or reboot your machine.

One you have GNOME reloaded, you are probably going to want to tweak your applications to scale their resolution correctly.  I followed the instructions in this article:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

Step 5 – Update Synaptics

The trackpad support for the Carbon is a little shaky in Fedora 20 by default as well.  The good news is that the 1.7.6 release backports some of these fixes.  Luckily you can get this release early by just installing from Fedora’s Koji RPM server:

sudo yum install http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org//packages/xorg-x11-drv-synaptics/1.7.6/2.fc20/x86_64/xorg-x11-drv-synaptics-1.7.6-2.fc20.x86_64.rpm

I found a great configuration from Major on his blog as well.  I started with that configuration and have made several tweaks – I think the setup is getting pretty solid.  I also add the syndaemon to disable the touchpad for a second after typing.  I’ve found this let’s me keep the touchpad fairly sensitive but avoid random taps when I’m typing email, etc.  I’ve added to the fixes RPM.  After you boot, you should run the following if you like the configuration and don’t want the settings to be updated via the settings widget:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse active false

I’ve also added a non-tap version of my synaptics settings that I’m currently using.  Curious on people’s feedback as to whether they like the tap settings or click settings better and I’ll make that the default.  You can find the non-tap setup .

Step 6 – Screen Brightness / Keyboard Backlight

Good news is that adaptive keyboard support is coming soon for Linux.  I’ll update once that is in a kernel that we can get at.  The bad news is that after a suspend, the adaptive keyboard is blank and doesn’t work.  We depend on that for backlight and brightness so we need a workaround.  Luckily the thinkpad-fixes provides them.  It ships with two scripts in /usr/bin to adjust backlight and brightness.  You can run them with:

# Brightness options (dim to bright)
sudo brightness dim
sudo brightness normal
sudo brightness bright

# Backlight options (dim to bright)
sudo backlight 0
sudo backlight 1
sudo backlight 2

A co-worker pointed out that you can also use the brightness slider in the top menu bar drop down (right below the volume).  That is a much easier way to set the brightness if you aren’t in a terminal.  I’ll leave the script for now but might end up removing it.

Step 7 – Fedy

I highly recommend running Fedy to setup the other miscellaneous features such as codecs and font rendering – Lately I’ve been using the Numix theme and the Infinality fonts and like them quite a bit.  You can install the Numix themes from Fedy and also the improved font rendering with Infinality.  I set the osx style fonts with:

$ sudo /etc/fonts/infinality/infctl.sh setstyle
Select a style:
1) debug       3) linux          5) osx2         7) win98
2) infinality  4) osx          6) win7         8) winxp
#? 4
conf.d -> styles.conf.avail/osx

To switch to the Numix theme, you’ll want to add the GNOME extension for User Themes by going to the following location – https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/19/user-themes/.  Then install the GNOME Tweak tool via Fedy and launch it and select Numix in all the theme options.

Lastly, I highly recommend the Dash to Dock extension as well.  I think it’s one of the best extensions out there – https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

Hope this blog helps a new Fedora user out there get up and running!

Fedora 20 on a Macbook Air

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Update 3/24/2014: Suspend working well, moving to mba-fixes RPM

Update 3/23/2014: Removing RPM version of backlight also added some attempts at avoiding wakeups

Update 2/17/2014: Added tip on reloading the wireless module

Update 2/5/2014: Added instructions for a shared partition and better backlight driver installation

With Fedora 20 out, it was time to refresh my Macbook Air (model 6,2) installation and see what I could get working.  You might have seen my earlier post using Fedora 19 but this time around, things went much smoother.  I’ve also tried to cover the initial installation with a little more detail, so hopefully that will help out someone just getting going.

Step 0 – Uninstall rEFIt

If you had previously installed Fedora on your Macbook like myself, you probably installed rEFIt as your bootloader.  Since that project is no longer maintained, you’ll want to uninstall it and move to the newer Refind bootloader.  I uninstalled Refit using their instructions and it worked fine. After uninstalling, I made sure I could boot into OSX by just rebooting and it worked.

Step 1 – Install Refind

I followed the Refind Mac OSX Instructions and while it was a few steps of pasting things into the terminal, it went very smoothly.  Since I have the MBA 6,2 model, I kept the 64 bit binary and drivers.  Also, the instructions mention that you can remove drivers to optimize boot time but I only removed the HFS driver.

Step 2 – Build Fedora 20 USB Key

First I downloaded the Fedora 20 ISO and followed these instructions to build a USB key.  I followed the Mac OSX section and used the dd program to create the key.  Worked like a charm.

Step 3 – Install

With the newly created USB key plugged in, you’ll want to restart and immediately hold down the Option key on your Mac.  That will pull up the boot device options and you can select the ‘Fedora Media’ option.

Note – I wasn’t able to successfully check the media.  When I tried, I received errors about a devmapper device not being present.  Continuing without checking worked fine for me.

Important – I’m going to describe how to do a clean install as that is what I normally do.  This is going to delete any existing Fedora installation you might have.  Also, if you mess up partitions, it could delete some of your Mac data as well.  This is the point where you need to triple check that you have all your stuff backed up.  I don’t claim this installation is fool-proof nor do I want anyone accidentally reformatting their machine as a part of this effort.  Make sure if that happens, that you aren’t going to permanently lose anything.

Step 3.1 – Partitions

Since I had Fedora 19 installed on encrypted partitions, it was a little confusing for me at first how to make sure the Fedora 20 partitions were created properly.  The following steps did the trick for me:

    • Select the encrypted partitions and unencrypt ALL of them
      • At this point, you should see the Fedora 19 partitions recognized, including swap
    • Delete all of the Fedora 19 partitions.  Remember – clean install being described
    • Click the link to auto-create the Fedora 20 partitions
    • Apply the changes

Sharing a partition with OSX

I wanted to share some data and documents between my OSX instance and my Fedora setup.  To do this, I actually changed the mount point of the /home partition in the Fedora 20 list to /mnt/shared (I had left enough space on the / partition).  I also changed the filesystem to Linux HFS+.  I assume that is just a non-journaled HFS+ partition.  Anyway, it created on install and mounts up on Linux.  The only thing I had to do was sync the UID of my Linux user with my already existing Mac user of the same name.  To do that, I switched to runlevel 1 and just ran (replace the contents in the braces with your values):

sudo init 1
# Put in root password
usermod -u <MAC_UID> <LINUX_USER>
chown -R <LINUX_USER> /home/<LINUX_USER>

After doing this, I was successfully able to read and write files when booted into Linux or Mac OSX.  I symlinked most of my directories like ~/Documents to that share.

At this point, you’ll let the install proceed as normal and you’ll create your users, root password, etc.  From this point on, I’ll assume you are running these steps from your newly installed Fedora machine.

Step 4 – Update

First odd thing I hit was that after the installation, PackageKit was telling me everything was up to date, so I had to run yum at the command line:

sudo yum update

That worked fine and applied a few hundred updates.  Reboot to get the new kernel.

Step 5 – RPM Fusion (extra packages)

You’ll want to install RPM Fusion to get the wireless drivers among other things.  You can either following the RPM Fusion docs or following these condensed steps:

  • Click this link on your Fedora machine and install it (free repo)
  • Click this link on your Fedora machine and install it (non-free repo).

Step 6 – Wireless

Now with the RPM Fusion repos, you can just install the broadcom wireless drivers:

 sudo yum install kernel-devel akmod-wl

Reloading the wireless module

After updating my kernel, the wireless module didn’t load automatically for me.  I’m fairly new to akmods so I’m not sure if the new akmod wasn’t built, loaded or what.  However, here is what I did to fix

# Make sure the module built for your kernel
sudo akmods

# See if the module is loaded (if no results, it's not)
sudo lsmod | grep wl

# Manually load the module
sudo modprobe wl

Step 7 – Backlight

Once of the most annoying things for me with Fedora 19 on my Macbook was that the backlight would always go to 100% after a resume.  Luckily came to the rescue and implemented a new kernel module specifically for the Macbook Air 6,2.  The source of his driver is located .  To build it, simply follow the instructions on his repository.  You’ll need to rebuild and install the driver on each kernel update.

For the X11 configuration file, I just create a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-backlight.conf with his suggested X11 configuration specifying the driver.  It works great.

Why did I give up on the RPM?  Well, I tried to hack around actually learning how to build a kmod RPM and the results just weren’t consistent.  Without calling ‘make modules’ and ‘make modules_install’ properly, the module wouldn’t always get loaded properly.  If there are any volunteers that are willing to put the mba6x_bl driver in a kmod RPM, I’m happy to host it.

Step 8 – SSD errors and Keyboard mapping

The next things I hit were some sporadic SSD errors.  In this thread, I found that I was able to set a queue depth to 1 and my errors largely went away.  Also, the tilde is mapped improperly so you need to apply a fix for that.  I’ve bundled both of these fixes as systemd service and a udev rule that will run at startup.

Step 8.1 – Add MattOnCloud Repository

I’ve created a yum repository that contains a built version of this code for Fedora as well as some of the other fixes below.  I’m keeping the  and pull requests are definitely appreciated.  This was my first attempt at a package that would automatically rebuild with kernel updates so install at your own risk…  To install my repository, run:

sudo rpm -Uvh https://files-oncloud.rhcloud.com/yum/RPMS/x86_64/oncloud-repo-0.4-1.fc20.x86_64.rpm

To apply the fixes, then run:

sudo yum install mba-fixes

Wakeups after Suspend

I found the following blog which describes a way to avoid wakeups after suspending.  This is a bit of a pain for me since I’ll suspend at night only to have it wakeup after I’m asleep and drain the battery.  I’ve created a systemd script that runs each startup and disables XHC1 and LID0 from waking the machine up.  This means that after closing the lid to suspend, you need to open the lid and push the power button to wake the machine up.  This is now installed by the mba-fixes RPM.

Random Items

I went ahead and ran  to setup a bunch of other random things, including the better IO scheduler for a SSD.  I would probably recommend doing that – there are a couple of options, but Fedy is pretty nice.

End Result

The end result with Fedora 20 is an impressive setup.  Mini-display to VGA projection actually works this time around which was a huge win for me.  Sound also works right out of the box.  Performance seems solid and I’ll be tracking battery life and updating.

I’ll keep you updated!