X1 Extreme on Ubuntu (Part 1)

I recently acquired an X1 Extreme and spent the last day or so getting Ubuntu (to be more accurate Pop OS) to play nice with it. I have documented them below partly for my own sanity and also to ensure that any other owners can use this as a starting point.

BIOS changes

1. Turn off secure boot. From what I have read it should be able to get Pop OS and secure boot to play nice but for now I am going to simply skip this.

2. Switch the Fn Key mode so that pressing F1-F12 keys does not require the Fn key pressed.

Installation

• Using Pop OS 18.10 amd64 nvidia edition Pop OS.
• Resized windows partition to 150GB. I prefer to hang on to windows for things like BIOS patches and other testing. Plus I can always boot the windows partition from Virtualbox (this is currently untested)
• Added a 24GB swap partition. This is 1.5 times my RAM - recommended if you want to use hibernation
• Add an ext4 partition after the swap partition.
• Point the boot partition to the existing boot partition (first partition) on the disk

Additional Software

Added some additional software on top of Pop OS default install

Extensions

Installation is web based from here. You need to install the addon (for either chrome/firefox)

• (K)StatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support - required to show systray icons for telegram, dropbox etc
• User Themes - manage themes
• Dash to Dock - move the dash from overview and convert it into a dock
• Windows Corner Preview - This doesnt work with the current version on the gnome extensions website. The easiest way is to install the extension from the site and then replace metadata.json and extension.json from the github repo. See details
• Unite - Cleans up the top-bar, makes the status bar look and behave better, auto hide top bar on maximize etc

Other Software

• Gnome Tweaks
• TLP - Without this the fans keep going off every few minutes
• Cheese - webcam/camera tester
• Chrome
• Telegram
• Dropbox - The icon is not clickable and hence am not able to configure it
• Other dev toole like VS Code, git, clang etc

Display

By default Pop uses the Nvidia driver with a 200% scaling. This makes the screen really nice and crisp however I prefer more space. Unfortunately as of now there is no support for fractional scaling. So you have 2 options

1. Scale to 100% and use the gnome tweaks to change the font scaling
2. Change the screen resolution to something larger (I am using 2560x1440) and switch to 100% scaling. Both options require you to disable the HiDpi deamon otherwise the resolution and scaling will reset after reboot

Battery life

I am getting about 4 hours on Nvidia driver. However since I dont really play games or do any graphics, I switched to the intel driver. This increased my batter life to something more sane (around 8 hours estimated)

Enable low power mode for Nvidia

Edit 10-nvidia.conf found in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d to look like the following

Section "OutputClass"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
    Driver "nvidia"
    Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"

    # PowerMizerEnable=0x1 = to switch it on or off (using hex codes)
    # PerfLevelSrc=0x2222 = is the performance strategy where 22 is the code for fixed frequency and 33 for adaptive frequency, defined for battery and AC use.
    # PowerMizerDefault=0x3 = is the code to enable a performance level for battery use from 1 to 3, being from high (1) to low (3) performance.
    # PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x3 = same as above but for AC power.
    #
    # Power saving on battery. Balanced performance on AC.
    Option   "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2233; PowerMizerDefault=0x3; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x2"

    ModulePath "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg"
EndSection

Original idea from comments on reddit here For an explaination of these options refer to these: Details Details

External monitor

It seems that the external monitors are connected to the Nvidia card only so need to use the nvidia driver for this to work. One irritating issue is that Gnome resets the resoltuion to default every time I connect/disconnect an external monitor.

Fingerprint

Not working as there is no driver support Details.

Webcam

Initially kept showing the IR image instead of the normal image. Use Cheese to change the device and things start working then

IR login

I want to enable something like Windows Hello login. Havent tried as yet but looks hopeful Details.

One thing to note is that this may not be as accurate as windows version since Linux is only seeing one IR device. From my understanding there are 2 IR cameras which make the detection more accurate in windows.

Hibernate

Tried to hibernate (systemctl hibernate) but when the machine started up all the programs were gone. So for now this doesnt work.

Summary

Overall it didnt take as much time as I thought it would to get an end to end running Linux system. I am a bit disappointed about the battery life and lack of finger print support but on the whole the system is fast, extremely powerful and well worth the money.

Written on December 29, 2018