How many of you dual boot/run Linux on your Thinkpad?

During the time on battery so did I do everything from "heavy duty" to leaving the computer alone time to time. But it seems that I have a constant power consumption.

When battery reached 30% so did I install the tlp package and minimise the brightness. But the power consumption still remained the same, 12w.



I do have a problem in Windows that the system can't get below 8w idle and 12w in normal usage. But in Ubuntu it's constantly 12w? Do you guys have the same problem?

 

You might want to get acquainted with and execute powertop to further investigate what is the main culprit for power consumption.

 

Idling with slightly reduced brightness I get around 8.5W power consumption (and I can get it below 8 by further reducing brightness).

You might want to take a look at ALLurGroceries's post here (specifically the GRUB boot parameters). There are some unsolved problems with Sandy Bridge power saving features in the kernel. So be aware that enabling those i915 features might make your graphics chip crash, but it seems most X220 users are fine with these settings.

 

According to Powertop so did it work like a dream. However, I did some deeper research and it seems to be a problem with the whole product solution from intel.

I have the Core i7 620lm and according to rumors so is the motherboard flawed by design. The graphic chipset and north bridge are constantly consuming power, in other words so do they never enter idle and consumes more power than the CPU. Maybe it can be solved through software, but it seems that there isn't even an solution for Windows. This is probably the reason why the Core 2 Duo versions offers much higher battery life.

 

For what it's worth, could you please provide a reference for these rumours?

Did you try the grub command line parameters mentioned in the thread linked to earlier by mtt1? Does it make a difference?

While my T61 with Intel graphics rarely leaves the desk and usually stays connected to its power supply, it does run about three hours when only on battery. I have put following grub command line entry to be loaded by the kernel 3.1.6 at boot time:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

You might also like to look into installing and running the recently release Linux kernel 3.2, for which according to the article at h-online.com/open/features/What-s-new-in-Linux-3-2-1400680.html "the DRM/KMS driver for Intel GPUs will enable the very efficient and Intel-specific RC6 graphics power-saving feature by default", meaning that the above mentioned grub command line won't be necessary anymore.

 

We might be moving a lot into the "Linux on X220" topic instead of discussing Linux on Thinkpads in general. But since there are unsolved problems, here it goes ...

You didn't read far enough. There were more problems discovered (or the old ones still weren't solved). So the power saving features were disabled again by default in 3.2 for Sandy Bridge chipsets. Have a look at these git commits, also cited in the article: 1 and 2.

Also have a look at this article mentioning and explaining other module options for i915.

 

I have been trying the find my sources, which were comments on different forums, but I can't find them. I cannot remember what words I used during my search.

I didn't dare to try some of the things they wrote about since they talked about it being experimental and only for experienced user. Since I'm probably lowest on the food chain for the Linux environment so would this be a to big risk. However, I found out that I could install the new kernels as simple as downloading a .deb file, so I'm trying out the 3.1 kernel (which was the latest stable release). Thus far, it seems to have greatly improved the power usage. Will report about this later on.

I also didn't dare to apply your line of code on my system since I have no idea what it does. But I will look into it later. Oh, and thanks for the help!

 

Hi, i'am a noob on installing OS but with Hearst's guide on fresh installing windows i have done at least one successful fresh install, i also installed ubuntu 12.04 lts, now(and before fresh installing win7 due to problems with my recovery discs) i want to do a dual-boot with win7 and ubuntu 12.04 lts. I have searched internet and haven't found any real help (for my level of knowledge) on how to do this dual boot thing.
So far i know that ubuntu used GRUB and i don't want to mess with the BIOS of windows and that it's uncertain or not recommended to have more than 3 primary parttions on a single hdd and my t420 (the one i want to dual boot) and has already 3: system_drv, win7 and lenovo recovery, so one question would be:
how my partition scheme should be?? (question for the ones who had dual booting systems) also would be helpful but not necessary to have a partition to trade data between the 2 OS's
I've already tried out ubuntu and i like it, but as a student it's not very comfortable to be working on an OS that i'am not too familiar with so i need to keep my win7 installed, hence my desire of dual booting, any help or link related to this question would me MUCH appreciated! Thanks in advance for your precious time :B

 

That is because there is a limit of 4 primary partitions on an MBR disk and older versions of grub did not support booting from extended partitions. That is no longer the case, so you can create an extended partition (which will be the 4th primary partition) and inside of that create all the partitions you need for Linux.

The ntfs-3g package which ships with almost every distro will let you read/write NTFS partitions so there is no need for a separate "data sharing" partition.

 

Right now, I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 with windows 7 on my T420s. Everything works fine except the nvidia driver. Still learning how to use all the stuff...