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Back to the world of Linux - Running Arch Linux on ThinkPad W520

Xinyun Zhou 4 min read Archived
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Windows Hell

Well, after a few re-installs (Windows 7, 8) and system failures (Windows 8, 8, 8), I am now coming back to the world of Linux. For me, Windows is slow, noisy and, most importantly, unpredictable. I upgraded to Windows 8 about two weeks ago, and the system unexpectedly crashed yesterday without any warning. It just blue-screened and restarted again and again. I have to say that a cuter blue screen did not make me feel better. On the contrary, when I see the cute blue screen, I know that Windows is trying to give people a good user experience as if they know that the system will crash.

Luckily I don’t have any sensitive data stored on the system drive, so I can just format the whole solid-state drive and install another system. Finding a system is a tough choice, which is like when women are trying to decide what to wear. For me, or anyone who uses computers on a daily basis, a good operating system means not only efficiency and reliability, but also feelings and happiness. It makes me feel terrible when my system crashes all the time, and the only thing I can look for is a smile on the blue screen, so again, either make your system less buggy (I will not say bug-free, but please, make it less buggy), or don’t make debugging the system too difficult or even impossible (a good example is putting only a smiley face on the blue screen).

ThinkPad W520

It generally works great with Arch Linux. I have an mSATA SSD as my system drive, which is about 64G, plenty for a Linux installation. I use MATE as my desktop environment because I found KDE and Gnome 3 are just too complicated for me, and I am really used to the old Gnome 2 desktop environment. Let me summarise the W520 hardware compatibility with Arch Linux:

  • The Nvidia Q2000M video card works fine with the Intel card using bumblebee (Nvidia proprietary driver), and I can power my second monitor using xrandr. I think the mechanism is to run a virtual monitor service and render it on the second monitor. You can find more details about it here. I am using DVI and normal VGA, and not using any DisplayPort or HDMI ports, so I am not sure what will happen to those ports if you try to use them.
  • The audio card works fine, and the internal microphone works fine as well. No specific system is needed; just using the alsa package will be good enough. I have a Logitech USB wireless headset, which also works fine out of the box.
  • Bluetooth does NOT work, but I think the reason is that Mate desktop is using bluez 4.x, which is pretty old. As I am not using Bluetooth at all, it seems fine for me. If you are using Bluetooth, maybe you want to avoid using Mate desktop, or you may want to use a later version of the desktop manager, or you may find a workaround for Mate with bluez 5.x.
  • Fingerprint device: actually I don’t know. I think it works, but I am not sure. I have never tested that, and using a password is not too much overhead for me.
  • USB 3.0, eSATA, all work out of the box, it is not a problem at all.
  • Some of the media keys and functions are working. I don’t care too much about those things; I hardly use them in any case.
  • Wireless is kind of weird, even though it works fine. However, if I am using a 5.0GHz signal, I will only have 54Mbps at most, but if I am using 2.4GHz, it can reach the maximum speed of 300Mbps as it does on Windows platforms. However, it is really difficult to stay at that speed. Most of the time I have 200-240Mbps, even though the router is almost physically touching the computer. No kidding, they are really really close to each other.

So in general, everything seems to be working fine with ThinkPad W520 and Arch Linux. I like Arch Linux especially for its freedom of choice and the full range of software you can choose from AUR. Of course, if you are not familiar with Linux and how those things work together, you may want to use an easier Linux distribution. Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint are all great distributions to choose from.

I was using CentOS at first; however, I can’t bear the old packages and limited choice of software. I know that I can download the source code packages and compile them all by myself, but for a desktop computer, I would still want to save as much time as I can on administration tasks so that I can spend more time on real things, like writing this blog article.