Lenovo ThinkPad X230

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Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
Touchpad		Yes
TrackPoint		Yes
Keyboard		Yes
Video	`8086:0166`	Yes
Webcam	`04f2:b2ea`	Yes
Ethernet	`8086:1502`	Yes
Bluetooth	`0a5c:21e6`	Yes
SD-card reader	`1180:e823`	Yes
Audio	`8086:1e20`	Yes
Wireless	`8086:0085`	Yes
Mobile broadband	`0bdb:1926`	Untested
Fingerprint Reader	`147e:2020`	Yes

Firmware

fwupd does not support this device yet.

To update the firmware on the device, get the latest bootable CD and follow the steps in Flashing BIOS from Linux#Bootable optical disk emulation.

Display

If you experience that your brightness setting is not restored on resume from suspend, then create config:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
Identifier "card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

HD Graphics 4000 supports external 4K display and audio via display port to HDMI adapter, but requires to add 4K mode manually [1]

Input devices

Sound control buttons

Note: Laptop has single TRRS CTIA/Apple 3.5 mm audio jack, see Advanced Linux Sound Architecture#Correctly detect microphone plugged in a 4-pin 3.5mm (TRRS) jack.

The red LED mute indicators light up automatically, if the corresponding channel is muted in alsamixer. The easiest way to make buttons work is to install PulseAudio and its plugin for your desktop environment.

GNOME - works out of the box
Xfce - install pulseaudio, xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin, add plugin to panel and reboot. Additionally xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin uses pavucontrol as mixer and xfce4-notifyd for sound level popups
Handle ACPI events with acpid the hard way. Some functions like thinkpad-mutemic are implemented in thinkpad-scripts^AUR.

X230T (tablet version)

Wacom tablet input

Works out of the box with xf86-input-wacom. See Wacom tablet.

Multitouch screen for the X230t

Some X230t models have a multitouch screen in addition to the Wacom tablet. Works out of the box with xf86-input-libinput.

Touchpad

Warning: xf86-input-synaptics is no longer actively updated. If possible, use libinput.

Under certain circumstances, the touchpad may behave very jumpily. Ubuntu Bugtracker offers a solution for this issue. Install Touchpad Synaptics and create the following file:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        # MatchTag "lenovo_x230_all"
        Driver "synaptics"
        # fix touchpad resolution
        Option "VertResolution" "100"
        Option "HorizResolution" "65"
        # disable synaptics driver pointer acceleration
        Option "MinSpeed" "1"
        Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
        # tweak the X-server pointer acceleration
        Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
        Option "AdaptiveDeceleration" "16"
        Option "ConstantDeceleration" "16"
        Option "VelocityScale" "20"
        Option "AccelerationNumerator" "30"
        Option "AccelerationDenominator" "10"
        Option "AccelerationThreshold" "10"
	# Disable two fingers right mouse click
	Option "TapButton2" "0"
        Option "HorizHysteresis" "100"
        Option "VertHysteresis" "100"
        # fix touchpad scroll speed
        Option "VertScrollDelta" "500"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "500"
EndSection

OpenCL

Thinkpad X230 based on Intel Ivy Bridge (3rd generation) platform which meets OpenCL 1.2 specification. Unfortunately GPU support in Linux is broken, so beignet^AUR and intel-opencl^AUR will not work. Use CPU-only intel-opencl-runtime^AUR instead.

OpenCL computation performance differ between CPU and GPU, depending on task. In many cases GPU is preferable. For Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU, which incorporates HD Graphics 4000 GPU:

GPU hashcat -m2500 -b -D 2 --force reports 3095 H/s (checked in Windows)
CPU hashcat -m2500 -b -D 1 reports only 2660 H/s, which is the same as no-OpenCL aircrack-ng -S

In this example OpenCL does not give any advantage, and it is better to look for other options such as building native binaries for your system.

Power saving

Main article: Power saving

TLP

Users of TLP need to pay attention to a hardware bug according to which it is recommended to only use either the upper or lower charging threshold. The following configuration is recommended by the developer of TLP.[2]

/etc/tlp.conf

START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=67
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=100

UEFI

Laptop incorporates InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS with classic text interface. It supports UEFI with Secure Boot, UEFI-CSM and Legacy BIOS modes.

Boot configuration

UEFI boot options can be safely (no bricking) set with efibootmgr or UEFI Shell v2 (checked with BIOS 2.77 (G2ETB7WW) EC 1.15). Though you can delete any boot variable, so be careful!

An EFI boot stub on SSD boots into a display manager in less than 25 seconds in non-CSM mode. Small ESP (100 MiB fat32) also supported.

USB UEFI update

Tip: There are unofficial firmware available, such as Coreboot or Heads in order to remove hardware whitelists and provide trusted boot.

All official updates, including Windows utility, Bootable CD and documentation can be found here. You can use geteltorito^AUR to create bootable USB images from the Bootable CD:

$ geteltorito.pl g2uj24us.iso > update.img 
# dd bs=512K if=update.img of=/dev/sdX

Insert USB stick, reboot and press F12, choose your USB. Follow the instructions.

Tip: Ventoy can also be used to boot ISO image from USB drive

Trusted Platform Module

Laptop has dedicated TPM 1.2 chip onboard[3][4]. It does not looks like it can be upgraded to TPM 2.0. Chip itself disabled by default sometimes, also owner clearing will not appear without Supervisor password set:

Enter Thinkpad UEFI Setup by pressing F1
Set Security > Password > Supervisor password
Set Security > Security Chip > Security Chip [Active]
Save settings by pressing F10 and reboot
Turn laptop off, turn on and UEFI option Security > Security Chip > Clear Security Chip eventually will appear.

Process described in "ThinkPad X230 and X230i User Guide", Chapter 4. Security > Setting the security chip.

Known issues

There is a BIOS bug that gets in the way of the boot process with LUKS and full-disk encryption. The user is stuck at the "Loading initial ramdisk" step, and does not see a password prompt to unlock the encrypted device. You can actually enter your password at this step, and boot-up will continue. However, updating the BIOS will resolve this completely. If you are using coreboot as a BIOS replacement, you can fix this issue by adding 'i915' to the MODULES list in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and rebuilding your initrams with mkinitcipio -p.
UEFI option to clear TPM not working. STM chip datasheet describes physical presence pin, which, probably, can be used as workaround.