Some time ago I bought a ThinkPad T440s for work. It’s an amazing machine! Before that I used a ThinkPad X121, which served me very well on my daily commute. This machine was getting a bit old, and given that my new job (more about which in a later post) also requires me to have a better machine with more screen real estate, it was high time to upgrade.
Ubuntu (13.10 and 14.04) runs well on the T440s, only two things didn’t work as expected:
- The WWAN interface (mobile internet, from Ericsson) seems to connect when I select it in the network manager, but the adaptor seems to disappear almost immediately after that. A few seconds it appears again. [edit 20140514]I just found out that it’s working, probably this was fixed in Ubuntu 14.04[/edit]
- The screen’s backlight brightness can be reduced/increase using the
Fn-F5andFn-F6keys, but only in a weird way: several key presses are needed for one unit of decrease/increase.
This last bug can be fixed by booting with the following kernel argument:
acpi_backlight=vendor
Simply add this to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_backlight=vendor quiet splash"
and run sudo update-grub. Reboot and you will be able to change the backlight brightness in finer steps.
I found this solution somewhere on the internet a few weeks ago, wrote it down, but can’t remember anymore what the original URL was. My apologies.