[CentOS] CentOS on new Thinkpads

Chris Adams linux at cmadams.net
Fri Sep 30 23:19:04 UTC 2016


Once upon a time, Michael B Allen <ioplex at gmail.com> said:
> The key features for me are:
> 
> * 1080 display or 900 would be acceptable but definitely not 768 (this
> rules out Toshiba)
> * Good keyboard with mouse buttons (Lenovo has always had superior
> keyboards and fortunately that have recently resurrected mouse
> buttons, yeah!)
> * RJ-45 (this rules out a LOT of laptops including Dell)
> * Intel graphics / hardware

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 4th generation notebook.  The only
thing on that list it doesn't have is the RJ-45 for the NIC; the NIC is
built-in, but you have to use an adapter on the docking port to get the
RJ-45.  The adapter cable is relatively cheap and I haven't really found
it a big deal to keep up with (and since the NIC is an Intel chip built
in, it isn't some funky USB thing).  It just doesn't have the port
because the sides of the notebook are thinner than an RJ-45 port (it is
just barely thick enough for the HDMI port).

I'm currently running Fedora 23 on it with no problems; don't know how
well it would work with CentOS (since new hardware support, especially
for notebooks, tends to lag some in RHEL).  There was a Linux kernel bug
related to power management in the initial F23 kernel that caused it to
not boot; someone from Intel debugged it and fixed it.

Only other problem I had was I got the high-res display, which made my
favorite terminal font (classic X bitmapped font "fixed" aka 6x13) too
small to comfortably read. :)  Solved that by just doubling the font
size to 12x26!  Wish someone would make an outline font that looks
essentially the same so I could scale it (I've taken a look at trying a
couple of times, but I have no skill for font work I've found).

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>



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