Month: March 2015

Goodbye to Windows

Made the move to put Fedora on the desktop machine too.  Seeing how many games were available for Linux on Steam made it a pretty easy switch.  Goodbye to Windows!

Installing the proprietary NVidia drivers were a little tricky at first, but I got it up and running smoothly.  Other than that, no problems to speak of.

Still having intermittent wireless connectivity issues with the X1C3, but everything I read says that there are just some bugs in the iwlwifi firmware for the Intel 7265 card.  I’m hoping that when Fedora 22 comes out in May that the 4.0 kernel will have that fixed.  We will see.  Excited about trying the plasma 5 desktop in KDE.

Lastly I got Tor up and running and thought I would check out the dark web.  Went to the dark web wiki and it’s pretty scary.  You can hire contract killers, buy drugs, and there were a surpringly high number of sites where you could buy things like compromised PayPal and prepaid debit accounts.  It’s actually pretty scary.  I’m guessing that if you get your identity stolen, that’s where it ends up.  Got off the website and I’m really hoping it never happens to me!

It works! It really does.

So after several days, I finally have this all set up and running optimally.  Well, about 98% optimally.  There is only one nagging issue I’m having, but it’s really not a big deal…certainly not enough for me to really care about.  But when I turn the keyboard backlighting on, it turns off after reboot or suspend.  It would really be nice if I could make it persistent.  But that’s small potatoes.

But if you’re interested in how to get this all set up, read on.

One note: this notebook features a “fn-lock.”  If the lock is not on, the F keys are mapped to their intended uses, i.e. volume changing, brightness, etc.  Press fn + esc to lock them to regular F-keys.  In Linux you will likely use them much more than their other purpose.  This means you have to now press fn along with the key to do something like change the volume, whereas before you would have to press fn just to get the regular use of the f-key.

Backing Up the Pre-Installed Image

I didn’t want to mess with having to be on the phone with Microsoft or Lenovo in the event that I wanted to put Windows back on this machine, trying to get a product key or God forbid having to pay for installation media.  Luckily, Windows 8 has a nice feature that allows you to build your own USB restore media.  All you need is a USB drive that is 16GB or larger.  Move your mouse to the top or bottom of the right side of the screen, and “charms” will appear.  Go to settings, and type “restore” in the search box.  You’ll find an option to create bootable recovery media.  It takes about 8-10 minutes.  Now you have a backup if you want to go back to Windows.

Continue reading “Getting Fedora 21 Running Well on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015)”

Been a while since I had a computer related post!  Got a new Thinkpad today!

Got a brand new ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd Gen.) and this thing is awesome!  It came with Windows 8.1 but I blew that away to install Fedora Linux 21.  I opted for the i7 processor and 8GB of RAM with a 128GB solid state drive, along with the 14″ WQHD 2560×1440 display.  It’s super light, doesn’t make a sound, is super thin, and with Intel’s new revision of chips uses very little power…even with linux the battery life is pushing about 8 hours.  They claim 10 with Windows…I never had it on enough to tell with Windows.

Here’s a few pictures I took of it while I was still at work…note the key fob to my car for scale:

Continue reading “New Thinkpad! Fedora 21! Manual Settings!”