Touchscreen laptops are all the rage these days, and each month we see more and more 2-in-1 and convertible laptops hit the market. Now all of these laptops are powered by Windows 10, which has been optimized to provide both a traditional desktop experience as well as a touchscreen experience that is much more in line with a tablet. Even in desktop mode, Windows 10 is pretty easy to use with touch. But what if you don’t want to use Windows 10?
Linux is, of course, your main alternative to Windows on a PC. This operating system is free and open source and there are hundreds of different versions, known as distributions for you to choose from for your laptop. But which one of these are optimized to work with touchscreens? That’s what I hope to answer for you today. Today we will look at a few of the best Linux distributions for touchscreen laptops so you can choose the right version of Linux for your touchscreen laptop.
Partitioned mini-bundles for each Lenovo ThinkSystem/SystemX Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/SuSE Enterprise Linux distros; Supported out of box drivers for each supported devices on each server. In cases where Lenovo fully supports the driver provided within the Linux Distro image, InBox support is indicated. Bundle portability. Apr 27, 2020 Dell may be the best-known Linux laptop vendor right now, but Lenovo is looking to muscle in on the pre-installed Linux machine market. So these laptops never materialised. Whether it was an intentional miscommunication on Lenovo’s part — Ubuntu. Jul 31, 2009 Lenovo shipped our review IdeaPad S10e with Windows XP, but thankfully there was some quality Splashtop action to show the world how much Linux.
A Few Things You Should Know
Lenovo BIOS hardware whitelisting. With most recent IBM/Lenovo's thinkpads, the BIOS is very picky on what PCI devices are supported. If your device is not a standard Lenovo option (or your BIOS is old), your newly inserted hardware may cause the dreaded. ERROR 1802 Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI. Nov 28, 2019 As is customary of most Dell laptops, it has a sleek design with a 1920 x 1080 resolution and 13.3-inch infinity display which you can update to 4K and it also runs Ubuntu 18.04 LTS right out of the box. If you’re looking for a stylish and lightweight but yet, powerful Linux laptop to flex with, the Dell XPS 13 developer edition is the best there is and you can buy from Dell.
Before we get into discussing specific Linux distributions, there are a few things you need to know.
Remember, sometimes things take a little more work on Linux to get right, but it’s so worth it. In the end, you will get the satisfaction of setting it up and I’m betting you will learn a thing or two along the way, and learning something is always a good thing. Just don’t give up. There are tons of resources online that can help you along the way. If you are lucky, you may even find a specific guide for your device, and that will make things much easier.
It’s All About the GUI
At the end of the day, it really all comes down to the graphical user interface. It is here where all the commands for both your mouse and keyboard as well as your fingers are controlled. The great thing about Linux is that you can install almost any GUI on any version of Linux.
In my experience, there are two graphical user interfaces that work best for touchscreens. They are:
Gnome 3 has been around for quite some time now and is very mature and stable. It includes an interface that is built with touch in mind while still working great in a traditional keyboard and mouse setup. It’s also found as the default GUI on many different distributions, so any of these would make a great option for you.
Unity Mac os x creating keyboard shortcuts for applications. , on the other hand, is the graphical user interface designed by Canonical for Ubuntu. These days, Unity is pretty mature, and quite sleek and stylish. However, its days may be numbered, as Canonical has announced it is moving back to Gnome in future releases. But they do say Unity will continue to be developed, so that is some good news at least. That being said, Unity is one of my personal favorites when it comes to touchscreen GUIs out there, and one I believe you will all enjoy using.
Best Linux Distributions for Touchscreens
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at a few distributions that will work great on your touchscreen laptop.
Fedora
Fedora is one of the most advanced Linux distributions around today. Strongly affiliated with the Red Hat group, Fedora is often a test bed for new software. Because of this, it often features cutting edge technology. But it does emphasize open source code only, so you won’t find any proprietary drivers included with it. That doesn’t mean you can’t install it yourself. Fedora includes Gnome 3 right out of the box, so you won’t have to worry about manually installing it, and it includes all the software you need for a good touchscreen experience, minus some swipe gestures.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu has long been criticized for the Unity desktop, but if there is one thing that Unity does do very well is touchscreens. The design of the graphical interface was made for it. On top of that, Ubuntu is one of the most popular and feature-rich Linux operating systems available, and many credit Ubuntu with popularizing Linux and bringing it to the mainstream more than any other Linux distribution has managed to do. With its rich features and great support for third party software, you will be hardpressed to find a better option for your touchscreen laptop.
Debian
Debian is one of the most stable Linux operating systems available today. Heck, it’s the distribution that Ubuntu is built upon. Without Debian, we would never have Ubuntu. The great thing about Debian is its customization. Using Debian you can install Gnome 3 or Unity on it, whichever you prefer, to gain that touchscreen interface you want. At the same time, it doesn’t contain the bloat that Ubuntu has, so if will run much better and much more efficiently. This is great for older laptops that have touchscreens or even an aging x86 tablet that you want to repurpose.
Another Tool You Should Consider
Does fl studio work with dmg. Multi-touch gestures is almost a must have if you want a seamless, cohesive experience when using your fingers for navigation. Belkin model f6d4050 v2 drivers download. While Gnome and Unity do a good job optimizing the look and feel to be very touch friendly, sadly they lack multi-touch and gesture support out of the box. For that, I recommend grabbing Touchegg. Touchegg is a multi-touch gesture application that runs in the background. It allows you to setup your own gestures and multi-touch commands, and customize them in many different ways. For a complete touch experience on Linux, i recommend grabbing this application right after you complete your installation. While you can tweak all the settings yourself, there are tons of config files floating around the Internet to help you get started much faster.
Parting Thoughts
While I wish I could give you a specific distribution that will just work right out of the box without any work, I just can’t. That being said, there are a few distributions in existence that will work better than others. The ones in this list provide you with most of what you will need for a decent touchscreen experience on your laptop. However, for best results, you may need to tweak a few drivers and settings here and there and you will definitely want Touchegg.
With a few tweaks and the addition of a little software, you can create an amazing touchscreen experience using Linux. By installing Linux on your touchscreen laptop, you get all the power and security of Linux while getting to keep your amazing touchscreen interface. So why wouldn’t you want to?
Have any of you out there tried to create a good touchscreen experience in Linux? If so, what was your experience like? What tools did you use to get the job done? Tell me about your experience in the comments below.
Matt Garrett
Matt is an IT professional with over fifteen years experience supporting network infrastructure and computers. An avid gamer, Matt enjoys his time playing and writing about his experiences both in the IT world and in the gaming communities. You can find more of his writing for LaptopNinja where he enjoys talking about everything tech.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X200 is a high-quality laptop featuring a 12.1' widescreen WXGA display, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (2.26 - 2.8GHz), an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD and up to 8GB of RAM whilst still maintaining impressive battery life.
ConfigurationWireless
The ThinkPad X200 has a Intel PRO/Wireless 5100/5300 AGN wireless adapter, supported by linux-firmware.
If connectivity problems such as a slow connection or aborts are experienced, especially when connected to a WPA2 Enterprise network, then try to load the iwlwifi module with the options
11n_disable=1 , 11n_disable=2 , swcrypto=1 , bt_coex_active=0 . There is no clear recommendation which of these options to be used as for some users 11n_disable=1 already solves the problem sufficiently, for others bt_coex_active=0 . See Wireless network configuration#iwlwifi for more detailed instructions.
TrackPoint
See TrackPoint.
Fingerprint Reader
Depending on the laptop variant the fingerprint reader in the X200/X200T could be supported.
Best Linux Os For Lenovo X200t Laptop
See fprint for more information.
Disable bluetooth at boot
See Power saving#Bluetooth.
Hard Disk shock protection
The ThinkPad X200 comes with an integrated 2-axis accelerometer providing the possibility of parking the hard drive's disk heads preventing from data loss due to heavy shocks. See HDAPS for details. It may be necessary to set correct invert parameter.
Mute button
If the mute button on the keyboard is not working, then be sure to add acpi_osi='Linux' to the boot parameter in /etc/default/grub.
Screen calibration
If the stylus happens to be working very imprecisely, the screen may be in need of calibration. Installing xinput_calibratorAUR and running the following command will begin the calibration process.
To save the calibration settings, create a config file at
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf with the settings provided by xinput_calibrator.
Loading the correct ICC colour profile
Download x200.icc and move it to
~/.color/icc . Load the profile with xcalib as follows:
Best Linux Os For Lenovo X200t Windows 10Screen rotation
Note: Commands like xmodmap, xev, showkey, dmesg, setkeycodes can help you. See Extra keyboard keys for details.
The screen rotation hardware button does not work by default. To enable it, the button must first be assigned to a freekey code. To find a free keycode for use, try using the command
xmodmap -pke | less .
Sha256 for os x 10.6.8 6 8 safari update. Keycodes can be mapped to hardware buttons during the boot process via a systemd config file such as the one shown below.
After successfully mapping a keycode to a hardware button, it can then be utilized with a script similar to the one below.
The assignment of the keycode to the script depends on the currently installed desktop environment. For GNOME, the assignment can be easily done in the custom shortcuts section of the Keyboard preferences.
If you are using another desktop environment (such as Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox, etc) you can always use the program xbindkeys.
Screen auto-rotation
Screen auto-rotation does not work by default. Installing the HDAPS package will allow for the utilization of the ThinkPad X200's integrated 2-axis accelerometer.
After installing HDAPS, the following configuration file may be created to automate screen rotation:
This script may be executed during startup to further automate the screen rotation process. See Autostarting for more information on startup automation.
Power consumption and fan control
Note: There is a useful blog post[dead link 2020-03-29 ⓘ] describing possible measures to reduce power consumption of a X200T to almost 7 Watt.
To set up an efficient power saving environment, install the tlp package. A detailed guide how to implement a simplistic power saving environment based upon TLP can be found here[dead link 2020-02-25].
Fan-control software can be used to further reduce power consumption.
Investigate Powertop and the powerstat-gitAUR package from AUR for more information on measuring actual power consumption.
See Power saving for additional tips.
Suspend to RAM / hibernate
Suspend to ram and hibernation is fully supported. See Suspend and hibernate for more information.
BIOS WiFi-Whitelist Removal
Warning: Modifying the system's firmware can be rewarding but it is also very dangerous. Proceed with caution.
Like most ThinkPads, the X200(s) / X200T has an FCC enforced whitelist for wireless cards. This means if a third party wireless card is installed via Mini PCIe or PCMCIA slot, the system will not boot. https://newresources158.weebly.com/motion-sensor-games-for-android-40-free-download.html. However, there are many individuals who modify and distribute whitelist-free BIOS updates online.
The whitelist-free BIOS for the X200(s) can be found here and the whitelist-free BIOS for the X200T can be found here.
Hp d1600 driver download. Make sure the BIOS version the system is running matches the cracked version being distributed.
For more information about BIOS flashing and system firmware, please see Flashing BIOS from Linux.
Coreboot / Libreboot
Warning: Modifying the system's firmware can be rewarding but it is also very dangerous. Proceed with caution.
Coreboot is a fast and flexible open source firmware solution to replace the system BIOS. The ThinkPad X200 is fully supported by Coreboot and good documentation can be found at the Libreboot project's official website. The X200s and X200 Tablet are also partially supported per the Libreboot X200 documentation.
Troubleshooting![]() failed to execute '/usr/sbin/inputattach'
If you see the above error in your logs, copy
/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/70-wacom.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-wacom.rules and comment out SUBSYSTEM of inputattach.
System feels unresponsive
If your system feels unresponsive and lagging, you can try creating a file called
/etc/modprobe.d/drm_kms.conf :
Backlight fails to activate after system resume
On rare occasions the backlight may not activate after resuming. See Problem with display remaining black after resume for possible workarounds.
PM device: Resume from hibernation error: Failed to restore -19
This is likely to be related to the tpm_tis and tpm modules not being properly unloaded before hibernation. These modules are required by the device listed in the error as 00:0a:
To unload the module create the following executable file called
/usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/tpm.sh , assuming the use of the systemd hibernation procedure:
mei_me 0000:00:03.0: suspend
If you are seeing this error, a workaround is to blacklist the
mei and mei_me modules. More information can be found here.
pciehp 0000:00:1c.1:pcie04: Cannot add device at 0000:03:00
See #mei_me 0000:00:03.0: suspend.
Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 30.
The Thinkpad X200 is known to report the following error on resume from hibernation or suspension:
In this case you can disable the high precision event timer (HPET) by adding 'nohpet' to your GRUB kernel parameter line.
High pitched noises
The X200(s) is prone to high pitched, low volume noises originating from the CPU, usually in low power scenarios. One proved solution to this is to disable CPU power control in the BIOS.
High pitched noises may also be emitted from the display's inverter board on CCFL models. This is normal behavior and may or may not be present depending on how much energy the installed display draws.
For more information see [1].
See also
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