Archlinux on a Lenovo x230 Thinkpad

Just a few days ago I bought a used Lenovo x230 Thinkpad on eBay (Kleinanzeigen).

The system is a familiar on. I already own one with an i5 CPU. The system I bought has an i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, no webcam (YES!), a 9cell battery, and it was shipped without any ssd or harddisk. Just the x230 with a power adapter.

I picked this system up about 100km away from here in Bonn. It was just a smooth drive with my Tesla over there. Just turned the music and the autopilot on and got an hour ride over there.

Back home, I just plugged in another 8GB RAM and an „old“ SSD. I knew that there was an older linux system on it, a xubuntu 16.04 LTS.

The fun fact about a linux is, that you can connect it to any system/laptop and it is just running. Of course this xubuntu was old, but still just running. Typed in my known passwords and voilà – it works.

I was testing the new x230 intensive with some regular bash scripts and tools. Some cpu tests….some ram tests….of course I also did some I/O tests.

That was just a good piece of hardware I bought. And it’s in a perfect condition. The keyboard, I currently writing on, looks brandnew….the buttons on that keyboard are in a really good condition. The screen, no light bulbs, no pixel issues….and even the fan is totally quiet, of course it’s just working smooth.

So after about 12 hrs of using xubuntu for some quicktests, I decided quickly to install a new, better and faster linuxsystem -> archlinux it is, what else?

So I just took some time to install the base system. A fully encrypted disk. A good package manager , yay , and yes, I installed gdm with gnome on that x230.

Why?

– Because I’m using gdm and gnome for a long time now and it’s just working fine for me.

After some little hacking sessions for doing some hardware tweaking settings, I just got it working with all the hardware inside. The UMTS card is working. And finally I configured the fingerprint reader on that x230. Looking back that is an awesome feature, I just swipe my finger over and got logged on. I had never used this before. Because on my „working“ desktop (which is just a Lenovo P50 Thinkpad) the fingerprint reader is not working good, because of failing drivers. And the P50 is always on my dockingstation, so I am not able to use the fingerprint, even if it would work.

At least I got a new small and fast Thinkpad for my daily private stuff. I needed to get things seperated – the work and the private stuff – because there might be a change.

At this point I would like to tell you, that this new, small, fast and used one Thinkpad just cost about 190,-€. the price was totally acceptable, because this Thinkpad is just on a perfect condition. Today I also saw another x220 Thinkpad (I already got on of these too for my KNX home automation) for a very good price. I’m thinking about to buy this too. So I would habe two x220 and two x230 systems. Pretty small systems.

So, for me it’s always a good choice to buy a used laptop, Thinkpad, because, for typical private usage, like mail, webbrowser, and IRC, shell stuff you don’t need an expensive brandnew laptop. On top of this, you will not get such a good price-performance ratio.

I found some information for the x230 and archlinux here.

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