So, for some reason I dug out my old Thinkpad Tablet 10 again and tried to fire it up. I have to admit I neglected it badly for the past – umpf – maybe thee years? So of course the first thing was that the battery was full flat, it did not even power up. So I let it charge for a while.
Linux did not boot anymore since I had to use the microSD card, that I had in there, for some other project but in the TPT10 I used it to extend the storage and had it entered into the fstab. Now gone the boot process failed and I was dropped into a recovery shell of the Ubuntu installation but not able to change the fstab.
So I thought, well, just for the sake of doing anything half way reasonable let’s boot into Win10 and let it do its updates. What a mistake, ob boy! Windows 10 is such a pile of cr*p! Unbelievable! It took literally hours (about 3 to 4) for it to figure out if there are updates at all! And after that it took many more hours to download and install them. Half done with the installation it wanted to reboot, usual, but it took, not kidding, more than three hours (!) to power down! It just hung there with the spinning dots „Windows is preparing the update, do not turn off your computer“. WTH!? After it did finally power down and I rebooted similar things happened for the next two to three hours.
So after about a day of waiting Win10 was finally done with it’s update dance.
Who can seriously work with that!?
In Linux this is a max. 30min operation, even for a distribution upgrade. This is so incredible.
The good thing about all that though is that during that process I also got a BIOS update from Lenovo, now on 1.50 (IIRC).
But let’s stop the ranting, here come the good news!
When I was last hacking on the TPT10 the Baytrail platform and the TPT10 inn special needed quite tweaks. Not much worked right out of the box, no wireless, not Bluetooth, no sound, no battery status etc. etc. So I was pretty afraid then if I reinstalled Linux to it I would have to go through all that again, that would be painful! So I decided to give it a try first and then see what to do next. So I got myself the latest Debian live/installer ISO image with non-free stuff (firmwares) and wanted to boot into the live system.
How do you get to the boot menu again?
After some tried I figured again: Press and hold volume down + power button, release power button after a few seconds and only release the vol down button once you see a mouse pointer – tadah! A UEFI bootable USB stick attached to the USB type-A port should now show up with its label, you can touch on the screen to activate booting from it.
Did not fully work though. I guess the USB3 USB stick I used draw a bit to much power and sooner or later would stop working. So I attached a powered USB3 hub to the TPT10 and the stick to the hub and here we go!
And to my great surprise in the Debian 11 (bullseye) live system pretty everything worked right out of the gate! Bluetooth and WiFi are there (wow!) and even sound worked, amazing! Also the touchscreen, ambient light sensor and accelerometer (orientation) worked. This was truely amazing!
So after some fiddling with the live system I made a backup of the old Ubuntu installation I had on there and then ditched that for a fresh Debian testing installation! Let’s see how this plays out.
OK, WiFi does not fully work, it sees networks but does not connect, need to look into that. Maybe I need to copy that file from EFI thing again, this NVRAM file for a proper MAC etc. That should be easy to fix. Booting I also saw that the Bluetooth was missing some firmware, need to look into that too, I think I had this previously. Sound work though! Even the internal digital microphones work. Also the broadband modem (Sierra Wireless) is detected and I guess will also when when enabled. Since the modem is a 4G LTE modem it remains usable for some more time (3G is being phased out quite quickly now).
One big question will be power saving things like suspend resume. Will this S0ix thing also work just out of the box?
And look at that! Also suspend/resume is working!
I installed Debian 11 RC2 with GNOME. GNOME picks up that this is a pretty high DPI device and activate 2x scaling for the UI. This way you can actually use the GNOME UI with the touchscreen, which is pretty cool. The Wacom pen also works out of the box.
After installing the firmware files from my old installation Bluetooth now works as expected (before it did only mostly work and did not e.g. properly find all BLE devices etc.). But I still can not connect to our WiFi, which is a bit weird because I can connect to an open (not encrypted) network nearby. Hmm… ah, here we go! I had enable WPA3 on my router, alongside WPA2, so latest Linux tried to use it but it seems the BRCMFMAC does not support it. So when in network settings I disabled WPA3 for that network and here we go, works!
So now pretty everything work almost right out of the box with Debian 11!
The usual things not (yet) working:
- internal GPS
- fingerprint reader
- NFC
- front and back cameras
Well… an if the battery readings are correct it can get 7.5h from a full charge with display on and WiFi connected. That’s impressive for that old battery!