I recently got my hands on a
Lenovo IdeaPad S9e netbook for a short amount of time (I don't own it), so I did a few tests with Debian unstable (more or less Lenny right now) and a Linux 2.6.28 kernel on it, see results below.
The machine type is 4187-42G, and it features an Intel Atom N270 CPU (with HyperThreading) at 1.6 GHz, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, an 80 GB SATA drive, an 8.9" WSVGA 1024x600 (glossy) screen, VGA port, LAN, wifi, bluetooth, 2xUSB, SD card slot, PCI ExpressCard slot, built-in microphone, and a webcam.
BIOS
You can enter the BIOS by pressing F2, the boot menu by pressing F12 during boot. Booting from USB works fine on this netbook. There's a
Splashtop installation on the netbook (called "Lenovo Quickstart" here) which you can disable in the BIOS.
Installation
There's no CD-ROM drive, so the simplest way is to use a USB thumb drive for installation. Here's how you can prepare one containing a Lenny installer (assuming your USB thumb drive is /dev/sda):
$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.0/i386/iso-cd/debian-500-i386-netinst.iso
$ wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
$ gunzip boot.img.gz
$ dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sda1
$ mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
$ cp debian-500-i386-netinst.iso /mnt
$ umount /mnt
If the above USB thumb drive doesn't boot correctly (which it did not in my case: GRUB error 17) it's probably because of a messed-up MBR. This is how you can fix it:
$ apt-get install mbr
$ install-mbr /dev/sda
Then insert the USB thumb drive in the Lenovo IdeaPad S9e, choose USB boot in the BIOS, and start the installer. Most of the process works as usual, the only small difference is that you might want to load the "parted" installer module in order to resize the Windows-partition on the disk (if you want to keep it) to make space for Linux. The second (fat32) partition seems to keep a restore image and/or the Splashtop stuff, not sure.
Audio
Works out of the box using the snd_hda_intel driver. The hardware is onboard audio in the southbridge (82801G / ICH7) and uses the Realtek ALC269 codec. If some programs don't have working audio, try modprobe snd-pcm-oss.
Built-in microphone
Untested so far.
Bluetooth
Works out of the box using the bluetooth and btusb driver. The laptop's Bluetooth device is USB-attached internally and shows up in lsusb as:
$ lsusb
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2150 Broadcom Corp.
$ dmesg
usb 3-2: Product: BCM2046 Bluetooth Device
After modprobe btusb you can use hcitool / hciconfig etc. as usual, and/or enable more related stuff with /etc/init.d/bluetooth start.
Sensors
The lm-sensors script detects the lm75, eeprom, i2c-dev, and i2c_i801 modules. The following is the 'sensors' output:
$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +36.0 C (crit = +95.0 C)
The hard drive temperature can be viewed with:
$ hddtemp /dev/sda
/dev/sda: FUJITSU MHZ2080BH G1: 44 C
HPET
The
Intel ICH7 southbridge in this laptop supports
High Performance Event Timers (HPET) which allows for more power savings and thus improved battery life.
$ dmesg grep -i hpet
ACPI: HPET 3F6E1E41, 0038 (r1 INTEL CALISTGA 6040000 LOHR 5A)
ACPI: HPET id: 0x8086a201 base: 0xfed00000
hpet clockevent registered
HPET: 3 timers in total, 0 timers will be used for per-cpu timer
hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
hpet0: 3 comparators, 64-bit 14.318180 MHz counter
You can check the wakeups-per-second with
powertop.
SD card slot
Works out of the box. It seems to be attached via USB internally (usb-storage driver).
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0158 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Stroage Device
PCI ExpressCard slot
Untested so far.
ACPI
Works fine,
see comments for "acpitool" output.
Network card
Works out of the box using the tg3 driver.
$ modprobe tg3
tg3.c:v3.94 (August 14, 2008)
tg3 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
tg3 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95906) rev c002 PHY(5906)] (PCI Express) 10/100Base-TX Ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55
eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[0] WireSpeed[0] TSOcap[0]
eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit]
Touchpad
Works out of the box, both in X as well as in the console using gpm.
$ dmesg
Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 7.2, id: 0x1c0b1, caps: 0xd04731/0xa40000
Suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM
I'm using the
hibernate Debian package. You can explicitly force the usage of either method in /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf by uncommenting the respective lines.
TryMethod disk.conf
# TryMethod ram.conf
Suspend does not yet work out of the box, however, as the machine is unknown:
$ s2ram -n
Machine unknown
This machine can be identified by:
sys_vendor = "LENOVO "
sys_product = "418742G "
sys_version = "Lenovo "
bios_version = "14CN51WW "
See http://suspend.sf.net/s2ram-support.html for details.
After a few test I found that s2ram -f -a 3 works fine (tested from console only so far). Now this needs to be integrated upstream and in the Debian package (I'll file a bug report).
Update: Submitted bug #520848, and an email to the upstream mailing list.
Wireless
There doesn't seem to be a mainline driver for the Broadcom BCM4312 wifi card in the laptop, yet:
$ lspci -nn
05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Neither the b43 nor the b43legacy drivers work as of 2.6.28. For now, one of two possible options is to build a (partly non-free) driver provided by Broadcom from source (option 2 would be to use ndiswrapper, I guess, but that's untested):
$ wget http://people.debian.org/~adamm/kernel/linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb
$ dpkg -i linux-kbuild-2.6.28_2.6.28-0.1_i386.deb (currently needed in unstable due to bug #518115)
$ apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.28-1-686
$ mkdir temp; cd temp
$ wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
$ tar xfvz hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
$ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd clean
$ make -C /lib/modules/ uname -r /build M= pwd modules
If that worked, you can load the driver via:
$ rmmod bcm43xx; rmmod b43; rmmod b43legacy (you could also permanently blacklist these modules)
$ modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip
$ insmod ./wl.ko
$ dmesg
wl: module license '' taints kernel.
wl 0000:05:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
wl 0000:05:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Wireless Controller 5.10.79.10
You can now run iwconfig, iwlist, etc. from the command line, or use some GUIs such as kwifimanager.
In order to disable wireless, run:
$ rmmod wl
So far, I only tested WEP (but not WPA).
CPU frequency scaling
Works out of the box using the acpi_cpufreq driver. Use cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance if you need full CPU power, cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave otherwise. Use -c 1 to do the same with the other CPU/core.
PC speaker
Works fine out of the box using the pcspkr module, tested with beep.
Graphics card
Works out of the box using the intel X.org driver.
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 600, maximum 1024 x 1024
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected 1024x600+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 195mm x 113mm
1024x600 60.0*+
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DRI works out of the box with the (mainline, open-source) driver:
$ glxinfo grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
If you attach an external monitor or projector, you can enable it using xrandr as usual:
$ xrandr --output VGA --auto
You can also use a dual-head setup by adding this to your "Screen" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2048 2048
EndSubSection
After restarting the X server, you can play with xrandr and move the external screen (VGA) "below" the laptop's LCD screen (LVDS) for a simple dual-head setup. The GUI tools arandr or grandr are probably a bit simpler to use than plain command line xrandr.
USB
Works fine, of course. The only small problem is that there are only two USB ports, more would have been better.
Disk drive
Works fine, it's an 80 GB SATA drive.
Webcam
Works out of the box using the uvcvideo driver.
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 5986:0141 Acer, Inc
$ modprobe uvcvideo
uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device Lenovo EasyCamera (5986:0141)
input: Lenovo EasyCamera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-3/1-3:1.0/input/input9
usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=5986, idProduct=0141
usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=1, SerialNumber=0
usb 1-3: Product: Lenovo EasyCamera
usb 1-3: Manufacturer: BISON Corporation
You can use luvcvideo for webcam viewing.
Battery
Lasts for ca. 3.5 hours, probably less if the system is under high load.
Special keys
Fn+CursorUp / Fn+CursorDown (brightness), Fn+ESC (enable/disable webcam), Fn+F1 (sleep mode), Fn+F2 (enable/disable TFT backlight), Fn+F6 (enable/disable thouchpad), Fn+F7 (Num lock), Fn+F8 (scroll lock), and Fn+F11 (F12 key) all work fine.
Fn+F3, Fn+F5, Fn+F9, Fn+F10, and all other special keys are untested.
LEDs
The power, disk activity, CAPS lock, Num lock, and battery charging LEDs all work fine out of the box.
lspci -tvnn
-[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27ac]
+-02.0 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27ae]
+-02.1 Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a6]
+-1b.0 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8]
+-1c.0-[0000:02]----00.0 Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1713]
+-1c.1-[0000:03-04]--
+-1c.2-[0000:05]----00.0 Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315]
+-1d.0 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:27c8]
+-1d.1 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:27c9]
+-1d.2 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:27ca]
+-1d.3 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:27cb]
+-1d.7 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:27cc]
+-1e.0-[0000:06]--
+-1f.0 Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge [8086:27b9]
+-1f.1 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller [8086:27df]
+-1f.2 Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller [8086:27c4]
\-1f.3 Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:27da]
cat /proc/cpuinfo
See comments.
Resources
All in all it's a really nice hardware, and it works (more or less) flawlessly without much hassle with recent distros/kernels.
Update 2009-03-22: Updated various sections, added more info. Added resources section.