John Heidemann / Other Stuff / Free Unix / Free Unix on Lenovo X1 Carbon, Generation 2

I recently purchased a Lenovo X1 Carbon, Generation 2 to run Fedora Linux (F20). I returned to a Lenovo Ultrabook in December 2012 and loved it, but the 256GB disk was a limit, and I was looking longingly at the high-DPI (hidpi) screens of the new X1 Carbon Generation 2.

Pros:

Cons:

Other things that have matured since Dec. 2012: USB 3.0 Ethernet runs at 1Gb/s (not the 100Mb/s limit of USB 2.0 Ethernet adpators). (Although this computer comes with an odd port that is dedicated for Ethernet.)

More experience

After a couple of weeks, some more experience:

I can’t get X11 keyboard mapping to work reliably, so moving the control key is still tricky. (1) it resets every suspend-resume. (2) When I remap I get very odd behavior, with ctrl-W repeating infinitely (a horrible outcome in emacs, or evince).

The softkeys aren’t horrible, mostly because I don’t use function keys very often.

HIDPI mostly works–but see evince bug #723431 for an important fix (work around: run evince as “GDK_SCALE=1 evince”).

I’m purchasing a hidpi external monitor to match resolutions more closely than my (otherwise lovely 30” 80dpi Dell). The ASUS PB287Q is “only” $600 and should match DPIs.

Overall: I’d buy this again to run Linux, but it will definitely be smoother in a few months when GNOME 3.12 is in Fedora 21.

FreeBSD

I don’t know about the status of FreeBSD on this hardware as of July 2014.

Copyright © 2012-2016 by John Heidemann