or: You’re holding it wrong. Seriously. Once upon a time, you could buy a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad with Intel graphics and it just worked. While the Intel issues in the last versions of Ubuntu were mostly home-grown, the current disaster with the Core i3/i5 on-chip graphics isn’t. Like in the X201.

The Ubutu experience

Getting Ubuntu 10.4 LTS to work on an X201 isn’t too hard. You just need to follow some simple steps:

1. Get Ubuntu (obviously) and put it on an USB stick; the X201 doesn’t have a CD drive
2. Go to http://people.canonical.com/~hzhang/554569/ and grab the latest kernel package linked there (see also Launchpad bug 554569)
3. Get the most recent BIOS update from Lenovo. A description on how to update your BIOS if you don’t have an optical drive may be found at thinkwiki.org
4. Go to the BIOS setup and deactivate Intel AMT.
5. Install Ubuntu normally. The installer should work just fine. If the graphical installer doesn’t, try the alternate install CD.
6. After the installation is done, boot from USB once again and go into rescue mode to install the kernel package downloaded before.
7. Boot normally.

Remaining issues

• External video
  VGA works, but if you shut down the machine with the external monitor connected, it will somehow lockup (CPU is busy)
• Suspend/Resume
  With the kernel from the launchpad bug, USB works after resume; the only thing I noticed is that sometimes the wireless LAN won’t come up again (like 1 in 10 resumes).
• UltraBase
  No idea yet. Haven’t used though it is said that there are still problems with the display port on it