Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'd like to buy Lenovo IdeaPad S210 and install linux (ubuntu) on it. So I'd like to ask if any of you have som experencie with running ubuntu on this notebook. Getting touch screen work is not so important, I'm more interested in installation (is UEFI a problem?), if wifi, ethernet etc. work out of box and what is the battery life while running linux.

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

I just bought one, and it runs great. Everything seemed to work, even booting off the flash drive.

I'm pretty sure you can install it with UEFI, but for now I just went all legacy. Just turn off all the UEFI stuff in the BIOS setup, and anything that says 'security', and turn on anything that says legacy.

The downside of going the legacy route, is that the Win8 option in the grub loader won't boot Win8. You have to hit F-12 when booting and select Win8 that way.

If you use legacy mode, the dual-boot option comes up during install. It wouldn't come up if I booted up in UEFI mode. But I know it can be done, I just recently did it with another laptop, but already forgot all the details.

It's good to shrink the Windows 8 partition (inside Windows) to <100GB, so that GRUB can make a partition under 100gb, or else GRUB doesn't work.

Ideally, I would've wanted to scrub the whole drive, and re-install Win8 and Ubuntu from scratch so I could have it exactly like I wanted it, but didn't want to spend the time or copying of the recovery partitions, etc.

The touchscreen works really well in Ubuntu.

The only problem I had was the brightness control didn't work. This fixed it and posted here: Brightness not working on Lenovo

sudo update-grub

I'd suggest installing tlp for power saving. Battery life seems to be at about 3 - 3.5 hours from it's estimate. The only problem is that the auto-dimmer doesn't seem to work when unplugging power. I'm sure that's fixable.

I think if I can spin down the drive more (have not heard it spin down yet), it would work well.

I'll probably buy a second power adapter, so I can have one ready to plug in wall at home, and carry the other with me. Saw one for $25. I would definitely get a 6-cell battery for it, if Lenovo comes out with one.

share|improve this answer
add comment

protected by Community Jan 14 at 20:04

