Installing Linux on Lenovo X200 Tablet

Eventually, I am the proud owner of a Lenovo X200 Tablet :).

The distribution I have chosen is Arch Linux. It's not an "everything works without having edit configuration files" distribution, but with a laptop with special hardware (i.e., tablet pc), you end doing it anyway. In addition to this, I like its principles, the community (AUR, forums, mailing lists) around it, and the wiki :).

Base installation

The laptop does not have a optical drive so we can install booting from USB or from network via PXE. First I tried the simplest case: boot from a USB drive. But the last stable (this word is not appropriate on a rolling release distribution, but I expect you will understand the idea) installer release does not include drivers for the Ethernet or the Wifi, leading to a almost useless installation. So, I used a "non-official" boot image with the kernel 2.6.28, which supports all my networking options. But, I didn't discovered why, but this image doesn't boot on my laptop. The screen goes blank with the message "Boot Error". Then, I tried to boot from network using this newer image (fortunately, I have a home server that could provide DHCP and PXE), following this guide, and everything worked fine. From this point, everything worked as expected and leaded to a full operational base system with network capabilities.

Apart from the network drivers issue, I spent A LOT of time trying to shrink the Windows partition to gain space for the Linux. The problem was that it had some unmovable files near the end of the partition, that limited how much could it be resized. After playing with several defragmentation tools (even some of them commercial software in trial version mode), I could gain enough space to be happy :).

On next posts I'm going to talk about how to configure the system to use most of the hardware (rotation and touch screen, special buttons, bluetooth, etc.).

Related posts:

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2. Linux on a Mac… why?
3. New Server – Faster, more Perfomance, More powerful!