George Wright's Blog: ThinkPad X300 and Linux - first impressions and power consumption issues

ThinkPad X300 and Linux - first impressions and power consumption issues

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:12:00 +0000

Today I got down and installed Ubuntu 8.10 on this new X300, and things went rather smoothly. I chose to use the ext3 filesystem on the flash disk, and not to create a swap partition (and opted to buy 4GB RAM for it).

In terms of things that work, the list is rather good. The wireless worked out of the box, sleep works, sound works, both batteries are detected, the graphics card works (with 3D acceleration) and general ACPI stuff works.

However, I have noticed a few problems.

First off (and this is really frustrating) - you can’t use the touchpad with the buttons from the TrackPoint (and vice versa). This means you can’t middle-click and drag using the touchpad. It’s frustrating because on my T43p you can, and I got into the habit of doing this because I find the buttons above are more conveniently located than the buttons beneath.

Secondly, it seems that display brightness adjustment sort of works, but keeps tripping over itself. For example, right now my screen is on 75% brightness but I can’t adjust it up or down because the hotkey daemon in KDE 3 thinks it’s on 0% (I’m assuming it’s getting this from ACPI).

Finally (for now) - power consumption seems to be rather high. When I’ve got the display on 0% and the CPU forcibly in powersave and enabled all the powersaving features suggested by powertop, ACPI still reports a power draw of ~12W. In comparison, my X40 drew 6-7W. Whilst I should have tested this before erasing Windows, a quick google search suggests that I should be seeing something more along the lines of 7-8W power draw.

I have also noticed that the fan is pretty much always in the high mode, even when idling, indicating that perhaps the CPU thermal management isn’t working properly. I understand the Intel L7100 is a “special” low-voltage processor that only the X300 uses, so perhaps Lenovo have done some crazy software ACPI hacks to thermally manage these special processors?

This is really bugging me because in Windows on a full charge I was estimated 8h remaining, whereas in Linux I’m being estimated ~4-5 hours.

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Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:23:40 +0000

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Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:22:18 +0000

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