Installation of Arch Linux on Lenovo Thinkpad X230

Introduction

About a week ago, I picked up a beaten up old Lenovo X230 machine with the goal of making this my schlepp-everywhere Linux development box.

Those little laptops are awesome! They support the Linux operating system extremely well, in fact most things work out of the box and reliably, such as sleep, hibernate, attaching external displays, Wifi, keyboard, touchpad, trackpoint, etc. The X230 has a full voltage CPU that’s actually quite beefy and makes the machine very pleasant to develop with.

First thing I did though was toss the built-in 4GB RAM stick and pop in a fresh set of Kingston HyperX SODIMMs. They can be had at Canada Computers for around 80$ and are totally worth the investment - especially when running tons of docker containers and VMs during development.

This git repo records my journey of installing Arch Linux, a running, binaries based Linux distribution that’s quite popular among developers.

Why Arch Linux?

Why Arch? Well I’m a big fan of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) at my workplace so I knew that I wouldn’t want a step-wise released system such as Ubuntu or Fedora.

Don’t get me wrong, they are by no means bad distributions of Linux, in fact they are well preferable for servers where it’s all about repeatability of the environment. In any case, that choice left me with Gentoo or an Arch-based Linux distribution.

I don’t like compiling everything and the kitchen sink from scratch - I’ve done that a decade ago during my undergrad days to learn about all things C++, make and optimization, but boy is it a time sucker! I need to be productive. Fast! That really only left me with Arch Linux. I dabbled with Manjaro, but in the end decided to go pure Arch for the power of choice. Here we go!

Hardware

General

• Intel i5 3360M with vPro
• Upgraded to 16GB RAM SODIMM DDR3L PC12800 CL9 204 Pin Kingston HyperX (Model HX316LS9IBK2/16)
• 9 Cell Battery Genuine Lenovo 44++
• Intel SSD 530 Series SATA 120GB

Output of lspci

• 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)
• 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
• 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)
• 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
• 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04)
• 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
• 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
• 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)
• 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev c4)
• 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
• 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation QM77 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 04)
• 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 04)
• 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)
• 02:00.0 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd PCIe SDXC/MMC Host Controller (rev 07)
• 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6205 [Taylor Peak] (rev 34)

BIOS Settings

Main

UEFI Bios Version	G2ET99WW (2.59)
UEFI Bios Date	2013-12-04
Embedded Controller Version	G2HT34WW (1.13)
CPU Type	Intel Core i5 3360M
CPU Speed	2.80 GHz
Installed Memory	16,384MB
UEFI Secure Boot	Off

Config

Network

Wake on LAN	AC Only
UEFI IPv4 Network Stack	Enabled
UEFI IPv6 Network Stack	Enabled
UEFI PXE Boot Priority	IPv4 First

USB

USB UEFI BIOS Support	Enabled
Always on USB	Enabled
Always on USB Charge in Off Mode	Disabled
USB 3.0 Mode	Auto

Keyboard / Mouse

Trackpoint	Enabled
Touch Pad	Enabled
Fn and Ctrl Key Swap	Disabled
Fn Key Lock	Disabled

Display

Boot Display Device

ThinkPad LCD

Power

Intel Speedstep Technology	Enabled
Mode for AC	Maximum Performance
Mode for Battery	Battery Optimized
Adaptive Thermal Management
Scheme for AC	Maximize Performance
Scheme for Battery	Balanced
Optical Drive Speed	Normal
CPU Power Management	Enabled
PCI Express Power Management	Enabled
Express Card Speed	Automatic
Power On with AC Attach	Disabled
Intel Rapid Start Technology	Enabled
Entry After	30 Minutes

Beep and Alarm

Password Beep	Disabled
Keyboard Beep	Enabled

Serial ATA

SATA Controller Mode Option

AHCI

CPU

Core Multi-Processing	Enabled
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology	Enabled

Intel AMT

Intel AMT Control

Disabled

Security

Password

Hardware Password Manager	Enabled
Supervisor Password	Enabled
Lock UEFI Bios Settings	Enabled
Password at unattended Boot	Enabled
Password at restart	Enabled
Power-On Password	Enabled
Hard-Disk Password	Enabled

Fingerprint

Predesktop Authentication	Enabled
Reader Priority	External -> Internal
Security Mode	Normal

Security Chip

Security Chip	Active
BIOS ROM Strings Reporting	Disabled
CMOS Reporting	Disabled
NVRAM Reporting	Disabled
SMBIOS Reporting	Disabled
Intel TXT Feature	Disabled
Physical Presence for Provisioning	Disabled
Physical Presence for Clear	Enabled

UEFI Bios Update Option

Flash BIOS Updating by End-Users	Enabled
Secure Rollback Prevention	Disabled

Memory Protection

Execution Prevention

Enabled

Virtualization

Intel Virtualization Technology	Enabled
Intel VT-d Feature	Enabled

I/O Port Access

Ethernet LAN	Enabled
Wireless LAN	Enabled
WiMAX	Enabled
Wireless WAN	Enabled
Bluetooth	Enabled
USB Port	Enabled
ExpressCard Slot	Disabled
Ultrabay	Enabled
eSATA Port	Enabled
Memory Card Slot	Enabled
Integrated Camera	Enabled
Microphone	Enabled
Fingerprint Reader	Enabled

Anti-Theft

Intel AT Module Activation	Disabled
Intel AT Module State	Not Activated
CompuTrace Module Activation	Disabled
CompuTrace Module State	Not Activated

Secure Boot

Secure Boot	Disabled
Platform Mode	User Mode
Secure Boot Mode	Standard Mode

Startup

Network Boot	PCI LAN
UEFI/Legacy Boot	UEFI Only
CSM Support	Yes
Boot Mode	Quick
Option Key Display	Enabled
Boot Device List F12 Option	Enabled
Boot Order Lock	Disabled

Creating USB Boot Media

Download the arch-XXX-dual.iso image from http://www.archlinux.org

Using Mac OS X

1. Open a terminal
2. Find USB drive diskutil list
3. Write image sudo dd if=archlinux.img of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m

Base Installation

Boot from USB

• Ensure Secure Boot is disabled in the BIOS.
• Hit ENTER on BIOS prompt, hit F12, select USB drive.
• In the menu, select Arch Linux UEFI.

Connect to Network

Either plug in the Ethernet cable, or to get access via WiFi, run wifi-menu command and follow the prompts.

Partitioning

We will use the following partition layout using the parted and gdisk commands:

• 512MB partition for EFI, formatted fat32, mounted to /boot
• 40GB partition for OS, formatted ext4, mounted to /
• 60GB partition for User, formatted ext4, mounted to /home
• 16GB partition for Intel Rapid Start, labeled GUID=D3BFE2DE-3DAF-11DF-BA40-E3A556D89593

Note that we will not create a swap partition in this system, since 16GB of RAM are plenty and anything beyond that we can more easily handle with swap files anyway. Instead we will use the Intel Rapid Start firmware of our i5 vPro chip to implement a BIOS based suspend to hibernate. It is also entirely possible to implement a software based suspend to hibernate on this system via a swap partition.

Preparation

• Check which block devices are available in the system using the lsblk command. Usually the SSD is /dev/sda.
• Start the partition editor with parted /dev/sdX, where X is the correct block device name.
• In parted create a GPT partition table on the block device. THIS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON THE DEVICE!

mklabel gpt

For the EFI Partition

• In parted run to create a UEFI partition of type EFI System Partition (ESP), formatted to fat32 filesystem with a size of 512 MB.

(parted) mkpart ESP fat32 1MiB 513MiB

• In parted set the boot flag on the ESP partition.

(parted) set 1 boot on

For the OS Partition

In parted run to allocate 40GB space and formatted to an ext4 filesystem.

(parted) mkpart primary ext4 513MiB 40GiB

For the Home Partition

In parted run to allocate 100GB space and formatted to an ext4 filesystem.

(parted) mkpart primary ext4 40GiB 100GiB

For the Intel Rapid Start Partition

Run gdisk /dev/sdX where X is the correct block device name. Once in gdisk we will run the following commands in order:

• p to print the partition table. The output of this command should say 16.5GiB of free space available on the 128GB SSD drive.
• n to create a new partition. Since we only have 16.5GB free space at the very end of the disk, we can hit ENTER on all questions until we see info about HEX code or GUID.
• Enter D3BFE2DE-3DAF-11DF-BA40-E3A556D89593 as the GUID for this partition.
• Finish with w and Y to write these changes to disk.

Create the Filesystems

Next, we need to format the partitions created in the previous step. I assume that you block device is /dev/sda and that the partitions were created as above.

mkfs.fat -F32 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3

Mount the Partitions

Now it’s time to mount our OS, Home and Boot Partitions. First we mount root.

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

Next, we create a directory boot and mount our ESP partition to it.

mkdir -p /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

Now, we create a directory home and mount our Home partition to it.

mkdir -p /mnt/home
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home

We are all set to proceed the installation and install the base system files.

Install System Files

With all the partitions mounted in place, we will now continue to install Arch Linux on the system. We install the base and base-devel collections:

pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel

After all packages are installed, we generate an fstab file. Here the -U flag asks the generator to use partition UUIDs instead of kernel device names.

genfstab -U /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab

Next, we switch into our new system and finish the installation there.

arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

First, we setup the system language:

nano /etc/locale.gen

In this file, find the line that corresponds to your language preference. Mine is US English with UTF-8 character support, aka en_US.UTF-8. After editing, we let the system generate the locale files.

locale-gen
echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Next, we configure the system time:

tzselect

We also create a symbolic link, for me the selected time zone was America/Toronto

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto /etc/localtime

Finally, we will use the hardware clock for our system, which expects the clock to be set to UTC. This can often mix things up with other Operating Systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, so be careful when multi-booting. Our system is a Linux-exclusive, so no worries there.

hwclock --systohc --utc

Setup Hostname

In the next step, set the hostname for your machine.

echo "my-laptop" > /etc/hostname 

Setup Boot Manager

We are using an UEFI setup, so let’s install grub and the efibootmgr. For multiboot setups, make sure to also install the os-prober package for multiboot support. We don’t need this for our machine.

pacman -S grub efibootmgr

Now let’s setup grub, our Boot partition was mounted earlier under /mnt/boot which in the change root environment becomes /boot:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=grub
grub-mkconfig =o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Add a User

First things first! Let’s set a password for our root user account before we proceed!

passwd

Next, we will go ahead an add a regular user account that we will use in our day-to-day activities. I picked nicbet for my username, you can pick your own!

useradd -m -G wheel,users -s /bin/bash nicbet
passwd nicbet

We added the user to the wheel group. This is a special group that will allow our user to execute administrative commands using the sudo tool. For this to work we will have to allow the wheel group to execute sudo commands. The safest way to do this is via the visudo command.

pacman -S sudo
EDITOR=nano visudo

Find and uncomment the line

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Install First Boot Essentials

Before we can exit out of our change root environment and start our fresh system for the first time, we need to install some essentials while we are still booted from the USB and have a working network connection. The wifi-menu command we ran earlier to get our Wifi connection working was installed as part of the base packages, however, for it to function, we need the dialog and the wpa_supplicant dependencies.

pacman -S iw wpa_supplicant dialog

Boot the new System

We are ready to boot our new system! First we exit out of the change root environment.

exit

Next, we unmount all partitions:

umount /mnt/home
umount /mnt/boot
umount /mnt

And finally shutdown the system:

shutdown -h now

Once the shutdown is completed, remove the USB Boot Media and power on the new system.

Kernel Modules

Power

Desktop Environment

Tweaks

Fish Shell

Powersaving

Automatically power down audio card

Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/audio_powersave.conf:

options snd_hda_intel power_save=1

Fingerprint Reader

Touchpad

Gnome3

Intel Wifi

• Create file /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf
• Insert lines

options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1
options iwlwifi swcrypto=1