Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Le vendredi 12 juin 2020 à 17:12:08-0400, Mark Pearson a écrit : > > On 6/10/2020 2:59 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: > > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 > > > > > > > > > My plan before this conversation came up was to keep an eye on > > > what fixes were needed to get things working on the > > > Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL front and then once those were upstream work on > > > getting those pulled into Debian. > > > > I really think most of the work should be done in upstream projects > > (so with upstream contributors), then making sure those changes are > > included in the relevant Debian version. That also means really early > > hardware shouldn't be needed since most of the *porting* work should > > have been done (and actually mostly by Intel and maybe AMD engineers, > > these days). > > > Agreed > > I'd say this is mostly about having the correct fixes in the Linux > > kernel, but maybe there are other parts which need fixes (maybe Xorg, > > pulseaudio, stuff like that?). > I used to work on network switches and moving to PCs has been > eye-opening. It's amazing the amount there is that can break :) > - Audio is a constant headache (instead of earache). > - Graphics is frequently fun. Nvidia cards definitely add a challenge but I > think that's improved a lot. OLED panels are throwing up some issues. > - Power management - suspend and resume, energy certification. Hibernate > right now seems broken/not supported well which I suspect is going to be an > irritant to a lot of users. > But ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, touchpad, thunderbolt, USB, touchscreen, card > readers, thermal, secure boot, apps, firmware, fingerprint, camera...the > amount of stuff packed into these devices still amazes me - and there is > always something that crops up. > > > > If you have experience on what was really needed in recent ThinkPads > > it might be useful to reach out to relevant teams. I only have > > hands-on experience with X250 (documented in the link I gave on my > > first mail), which is a bit old now I guess (I have hands-on > > experience on an X280 but it was maybe 18months after it was released > > so basically everything was already working just fine) > We're going though this on our 2020 platforms right now so it's an > interesting point. I think I can safely say that it is constantly varied :) > The impression I get though is this year things are going more smoothly than > last year - I'd like to claim that this is because we are more > experienced.I might be kidding myself. > > I should document it though - right now my gut feeling is I can't point to > one or two candidates and go "they always cause trouble". It's truly varied > > > > > > > > Anyway - if there was interest we could explore what was involved > > > with choosing a couple of platforms, getting them to a Debian > > > developer or two and going from there. I don't know how early in > > > the process we'd be able to make HW available - it is *really* hard > > > to get hold of these early systems (based on personal experience). > > > That's a challenge I'm willing to take on if it's something that > > > there is interest in. > > > > So right now what would be the target hardware / timescale we'd be > > talking about? There's definitely no reason that Lenovo product(s) > > roadmap(s) and Debian stable roadmap should be aligned, so there are > > few interesting things: > An interesting question. I'd actually like to bounce that back at the > community. After all - if the aim is to have platforms that work with Debian > the people who are going to want these are likely to be Debian folk (you're > not the first choice for Linux noobs ;)) > > I have some ideas but is there a 'wishlist' or guidance on which platforms > are the most popular? Either Lenovo specifics (makes my life easier) or > general "it should have at least ". > > Anybody want to setup a Debian survey? :) > > > > - - making sure “current” generations products work fine on Debian > > stable/Buster, so they could be “qualified” to ship with Buster > > preinstalled (I'm unsure how realistic it for current products, but > > making sure *they* work is a first start I guess) - - making sure > > “next” generation products work fine on Debian stable/Buster so they > > could be qualified to ship with Buster preinstalled (maybe a little > > more realistic but I guess it also depends on the timescale) - - > > making sure “future” products work fine in Debian testing (Bullseye) > > so once it's released the products can be qualified on it and > > hopefully ship with Bullseye preinstalled > This makes sense but I'll be honest - I haven't run Buster on anything in a > long time. For me too much doesn't work (touchpad, graphics, audio, > networking usually). I go straight for Bullseye and then to unstable and > sometimes to experimental. > > > > > For “current” products I guess we mean everything until the 2020 > > generation (so including X13/T14/T15, I don't really
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 2020-06-14 10:59, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: > Hibernation doesn't work with Secure Boot at the moment (there's no > infrastructure in the Linux kernel to verify that you're not resuming to an > “unsigned” memory image). Not sure how much people hibernate these days anyway I *always* hibernate my laptops. I use poweroff/reboot on kernel or init update only. Suspend is not useful to me, because battery would be empty most of the time, when I'm back at the machine. But my machines (X220, X220i) probably do not support secure boot anyway, right?
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On Fri, 2020-06-12 at 17:12 -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: > On 6/10/2020 2:59 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: > - Audio is a constant headache (instead of earache). > - Graphics is frequently fun. Nvidia cards definitely add a challenge > but I think that's improved a lot. OLED panels are throwing up some issues. > - Power management - suspend and resume, energy certification. Hibernate > right now seems broken/not supported well which I suspect is going to be > an irritant to a lot of users. Hibernation doesn't work with Secure Boot at the moment (there's no infrastructure in the Linux kernel to verify that you're not resuming to an “unsigned” memory image). Not sure how much people hibernate these days anyway (I did that a lot on workstations but quite never on laptops) > But ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, touchpad, thunderbolt, USB, touchscreen, > card readers, thermal, secure boot, apps, firmware, fingerprint, > camera...the amount of stuff packed into these devices still amazes me - > and there is always something that crops up. Indeed but I have the feeling, again, that most stuff is needed in the kernel, and most of the stuff are required upstream first. For the current generation, are those fixes already in upstream projects and we're talking about how to include them in Debian (preferably stable). Or does the work need to be done upstream? > > If you have experience on what was really needed in recent ThinkPads > > it might be useful to reach out to relevant teams. I only have > > hands-on experience with X250 (documented in the link I gave on my > > first mail), which is a bit old now I guess (I have hands-on > > experience on an X280 but it was maybe 18months after it was released > > so basically everything was already working just fine) > We're going though this on our 2020 platforms right now so it's an > interesting point. I think I can safely say that it is constantly varied > :) The impression I get though is this year things are going more > smoothly than last year - I'd like to claim that this is because we are > more experienced.I might be kidding myself. > > I should document it though - right now my gut feeling is I can't point > to one or two candidates and go "they always cause trouble". It's truly > varied > > An interesting question. I'd actually like to bounce that back at the > community. After all - if the aim is to have platforms that work with > Debian the people who are going to want these are likely to be Debian > folk (you're not the first choice for Linux noobs ;)) > > I have some ideas but is there a 'wishlist' or guidance on which > platforms are the most popular? Either Lenovo specifics (makes my life > easier) or general "it should have at least ". My gut feeling is that the X and T series are the most popular. I'm myself was quite fond of the X series because of the small form factor, but I've not yet touched a 13.3" version (X390/X13). And indeed the X1C seems popular as well. I'd say Debian folks also are a bit traditionalist and didn't appreciate some of the changes (like lowering the number of USB ports, moving to a dongle for Ethernet, stuff like that) so maybe people have moved from X to T for that. > > Anybody want to setup a Debian survey? :) Same as Paul, it might make sense to setup one on survey.debian.net > > - - making sure “current” generations products work fine on Debian > > stable/Buster, so they could be “qualified” to ship with Buster > > preinstalled (I'm unsure how realistic it for current products, but > > making sure *they* work is a first start I guess) - - making sure > > “next” generation products work fine on Debian stable/Buster so they > > could be qualified to ship with Buster preinstalled (maybe a little > > more realistic but I guess it also depends on the timescale) - - > > making sure “future” products work fine in Debian testing (Bullseye) > > so once it's released the products can be qualified on it and > > hopefully ship with Bullseye preinstalled > This makes sense but I'll be honest - I haven't run Buster on anything > in a long time. For me too much doesn't work (touchpad, graphics, audio, > networking usually). I go straight for Bullseye and then to unstable and > sometimes to experimental. As a (Debian) developer I run sid on my machines because I need and want to be aware of what's currently changing, but I'd say the target should still be the current stable versions, and if some stuff need backporting which should try to do it. In some cases it's not that problematic to include support for new hardware to a stable/LTS Linux kernel, but someone has to test and propose it. In other cases indeed it's definitely not possible. But again for things like CPU/GPU support it's more of an Intel/AMD/(NVidia) stuff. > > > For “current” products I guess we mean everything until the 2020 > > generation (so including X13/T14/T15, I don't really know that
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Kurt On 6/13/2020 5:47 AM, Kurt Roeckx wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 05:10:11PM -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: Hi Kurt On 6/12/2020 2:58 PM, Kurt Roeckx wrote: On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:39:08PM +, Mark Pearson wrote: The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open source projects. Hi Mark, Do you know if Lenovo plans to support Linux on all it's products? I use LVFS as in indication that it's supported. And there are various products I'm considering buying, most of them are currently not on LVFS. I'm looking at things from the ThinkCentre, IdeaCentre or Legion line. ThinkCentre should be supported (I'm not 100% sure all of them are - I can check that) The only one in LVFS are M90n-1 and M625q, where the M625q doesn't seem to be for sale anymore. On the other hand, if I look at the website, it depends on what information you look at. If you just look at the comparison between models, they all only mention Windows 10, except the M75q which mentions Linux. But if you look at the details, the M75s and M75q support Linux, but neither is on LVFS. Hmm - I'll have to go dig and see. More than that are supposed to be supported though just last week I beat up some BIOS teams who haven't been uploading to LVFS (as part of the platform specifications they are required to do it but it hadn't been doneit's still new here) Supported platforms for 2019 were (I think): M920 t/s/q/z; M720 t/s/q; M630e, M90n, M75s/q, M820z, EPC300 I've been doing a bunch of work on the M90n (though I haven't put Debian on it yet admittedly) I'll chase down the others and confirm. Mark
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 05:10:11PM -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: > Hi Kurt > > On 6/12/2020 2:58 PM, Kurt Roeckx wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:39:08PM +, Mark Pearson wrote: > > > > > > The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another > > > big announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations > > > with Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support > > > upstream including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not > > > perfect yet but it's getting better and better. We're starting to > > > contribute to open source projects. > > > > Hi Mark, > > > > Do you know if Lenovo plans to support Linux on all it's products? > > > > I use LVFS as in indication that it's supported. And there are > > various products I'm considering buying, most of them are > > currently not on LVFS. I'm looking at things from the > > ThinkCentre, IdeaCentre or Legion line. > > > > ThinkCentre should be supported (I'm not 100% sure all of them are - I can > check that) The only one in LVFS are M90n-1 and M625q, where the M625q doesn't seem to be for sale anymore. On the other hand, if I look at the website, it depends on what information you look at. If you just look at the comparison between models, they all only mention Windows 10, except the M75q which mentions Linux. But if you look at the details, the M75s and M75q support Linux, but neither is on LVFS. Kurt
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 9:47 PM Mark Pearson wrote: > I have some ideas but is there a 'wishlist' or guidance on which > platforms are the most popular? Either Lenovo specifics (makes my life > easier) or general "it should have at least ". Assume you are talking about hardware platforms here. Debian only has popularity information for architectures, not more specific than that. They don't exactly measure popularity, but the install howtos and installation reports are probably useful. Outside Debian there is the Linux Hardware Database, which allows folks running Linux to voluntarily submit details of their Linux distribution and hardware. The project also publishes some monthly statistics about the submissions. I gently suggest that Lenovo should be ensuring that all their Linux capable hardware is represented in the database with at least one probe :) https://popcon.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn https://bugs.debian.org/installation-reports https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Database https://linux-hardware.org/ https://linux-hardware.org/?view=timeline=Debian https://github.com/linuxhw/Trends/tree/master/Dist/Debian > Anybody want to setup a Debian survey? :) I guess the surveys site would be the place to do that and the publicity team could help draw attention to it from the desired audience. https://surveys.debian.net/ https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity https://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews > So we have a few platforms coming out in the next few months. X1 Carbon > is usually high on users wish list - but maybe that's less the case for > developers? (I personally quite like mine...) I've seen previous models of X1 Carbon at DebConf in past years. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 6/10/2020 2:59 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 My plan before this conversation came up was to keep an eye on what fixes were needed to get things working on the Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL front and then once those were upstream work on getting those pulled into Debian. I really think most of the work should be done in upstream projects (so with upstream contributors), then making sure those changes are included in the relevant Debian version. That also means really early hardware shouldn't be needed since most of the *porting* work should have been done (and actually mostly by Intel and maybe AMD engineers, these days). Agreed I'd say this is mostly about having the correct fixes in the Linux kernel, but maybe there are other parts which need fixes (maybe Xorg, pulseaudio, stuff like that?). I used to work on network switches and moving to PCs has been eye-opening. It's amazing the amount there is that can break :) - Audio is a constant headache (instead of earache). - Graphics is frequently fun. Nvidia cards definitely add a challenge but I think that's improved a lot. OLED panels are throwing up some issues. - Power management - suspend and resume, energy certification. Hibernate right now seems broken/not supported well which I suspect is going to be an irritant to a lot of users. But ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, touchpad, thunderbolt, USB, touchscreen, card readers, thermal, secure boot, apps, firmware, fingerprint, camera...the amount of stuff packed into these devices still amazes me - and there is always something that crops up. If you have experience on what was really needed in recent ThinkPads it might be useful to reach out to relevant teams. I only have hands-on experience with X250 (documented in the link I gave on my first mail), which is a bit old now I guess (I have hands-on experience on an X280 but it was maybe 18months after it was released so basically everything was already working just fine) We're going though this on our 2020 platforms right now so it's an interesting point. I think I can safely say that it is constantly varied :) The impression I get though is this year things are going more smoothly than last year - I'd like to claim that this is because we are more experienced.I might be kidding myself. I should document it though - right now my gut feeling is I can't point to one or two candidates and go "they always cause trouble". It's truly varied Anyway - if there was interest we could explore what was involved with choosing a couple of platforms, getting them to a Debian developer or two and going from there. I don't know how early in the process we'd be able to make HW available - it is *really* hard to get hold of these early systems (based on personal experience). That's a challenge I'm willing to take on if it's something that there is interest in. So right now what would be the target hardware / timescale we'd be talking about? There's definitely no reason that Lenovo product(s) roadmap(s) and Debian stable roadmap should be aligned, so there are few interesting things: An interesting question. I'd actually like to bounce that back at the community. After all - if the aim is to have platforms that work with Debian the people who are going to want these are likely to be Debian folk (you're not the first choice for Linux noobs ;)) I have some ideas but is there a 'wishlist' or guidance on which platforms are the most popular? Either Lenovo specifics (makes my life easier) or general "it should have at least ". Anybody want to setup a Debian survey? :) - - making sure “current” generations products work fine on Debian stable/Buster, so they could be “qualified” to ship with Buster preinstalled (I'm unsure how realistic it for current products, but making sure *they* work is a first start I guess) - - making sure “next” generation products work fine on Debian stable/Buster so they could be qualified to ship with Buster preinstalled (maybe a little more realistic but I guess it also depends on the timescale) - - making sure “future” products work fine in Debian testing (Bullseye) so once it's released the products can be qualified on it and hopefully ship with Bullseye preinstalled This makes sense but I'll be honest - I haven't run Buster on anything in a long time. For me too much doesn't work (touchpad, graphics, audio, networking usually). I go straight for Bullseye and then to unstable and sometimes to experimental. For “current” products I guess we mean everything until the 2020 generation (so including X13/T14/T15, I don't really know that much the rest of Lenovo lineup). For those I assume there would be no NDA needed (and actually there might already be some hardware in the hands of relevant people). For “next” I guess it depends a bit on the timescale and the level of upstream support already here. For “future” it's even more true, and my guess would be that
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Kurt On 6/12/2020 2:58 PM, Kurt Roeckx wrote: On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:39:08PM +, Mark Pearson wrote: The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open source projects. Hi Mark, Do you know if Lenovo plans to support Linux on all it's products? I use LVFS as in indication that it's supported. And there are various products I'm considering buying, most of them are currently not on LVFS. I'm looking at things from the ThinkCentre, IdeaCentre or Legion line. ThinkCentre should be supported (I'm not 100% sure all of them are - I can check that) IdeaCentre and Legion aren't covered yet I'm afraid. Mark
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 01:39:08PM +, Mark Pearson wrote: > > The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big > announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with > Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream > including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet > but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open > source projects. Hi Mark, Do you know if Lenovo plans to support Linux on all it's products? I use LVFS as in indication that it's supported. And there are various products I'm considering buying, most of them are currently not on LVFS. I'm looking at things from the ThinkCentre, IdeaCentre or Legion line. Kurt
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 6/10/20 2:50 AM, RP wrote: > On 6/9/20 12:19 PM, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> use the install disk as an all around rescue disk. >> You can - there's a "rescue mode" if you look in the boot menus... >> > That's true, but I was looking for more tools than what busybox comes > with. Like an all purpose installer/rescue disk. One more reason to port d-i to libc6... :) Thomas
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On Wed, 2020-06-10 at 08:43 -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: > Hi Yves-Alexis > > > What can be done in the Debian community to help you do that *before* > > the hardware are in the hand of volunteers, because as you already > > said that means the laptops work perfectly 6-8 months after the > > release which is too late. > > > That's a really good question. I was thinking about it over the weekend > and I'm not sure what the right answer is here. If Lenovo were able to > make systems available earlier who would they go to? How does that work > with a community like Debian? If NDAs are involved (which would depend > on how early in the process you get HW) is that a problem? I'm not really sure if Debian as an entity can sign NDA, but individual developers sure can. That beeing said, I'm unsure how early access is really needed. > > My plan before this conversation came up was to keep an eye on what > fixes were needed to get things working on the Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL front > and then once those were upstream work on getting those pulled into Debian. I really think most of the work should be done in upstream projects (so with upstream contributors), then making sure those changes are included in the relevant Debian version. That also means really early hardware shouldn't be needed since most of the *porting* work should have been done (and actually mostly by Intel and maybe AMD engineers, these days). I'd say this is mostly about having the correct fixes in the Linux kernel, but maybe there are other parts which need fixes (maybe Xorg, pulseaudio, stuff like that?). If you have experience on what was really needed in recent ThinkPads it might be useful to reach out to relevant teams. I only have hands-on experience with X250 (documented in the link I gave on my first mail), which is a bit old now I guess (I have hands-on experience on an X280 but it was maybe 18months after it was released so basically everything was already working just fine) > > Obviously having more competent people than myself do that process and > be able to test it directly would speed things up (a lot :)) but that's > potentially a bunch of work to place on a few people (due to limited > HW). On the plus side - my understanding is that whoever worked on it > would get to keep the HW...don't know if that is tempting or not :) I don't think people will really do *specifically for that reason* anyway :) That can help, but once you did that twice or thrice, I guess you begin to have way too much hardware at home :) Also an option would be for Lenovo to actually hire people to do the technical work and submit it, but as you said below it might need a mentor or something to start stuff. > > I think it's very important for Lenovo to become active and competent > contributors to the community. I don't think it is healthy for us to > just dump HW and say "please fix" - we really should be contributing to > the community for our HW. Maybe a hybrid model where some Debian folk > with some time and interest get HW and are willing to mentor/support? > I'm guessing the first couple of platforms would be more challenging but > in theory it would get easier and less demanding (hopefully :))? If the work is already done upstream, I think it boils down to getting maintainer teams aware of the upstream fixes/commits they'd need to pull, and if there are large and/or complicated, maybe help a bit on the porting. And yes maybe at that point if you don't feel skilled enough it might help to have “mentors” which could do a bit of technical work (backporting, testing etc.) > > Anyway - if there was interest we could explore what was involved with > choosing a couple of platforms, getting them to a Debian developer or > two and going from there. I don't know how early in the process we'd be > able to make HW available - it is *really* hard to get hold of these > early systems (based on personal experience). That's a challenge I'm > willing to take on if it's something that there is interest in. So right now what would be the target hardware / timescale we'd be talking about? There's definitely no reason that Lenovo product(s) roadmap(s) and Debian stable roadmap should be aligned, so there are few interesting things: - - making sure “current” generations products work fine on Debian stable/Buster, so they could be “qualified” to ship with Buster preinstalled (I'm unsure how realistic it for current products, but making sure *they* work is a first start I guess) - - making sure “next” generation products work fine on Debian stable/Buster so they could be qualified to ship with Buster preinstalled (maybe a little more realistic but I guess it also depends on the timescale) - - making sure “future” products work fine in Debian testing (Bullseye) so once it's released the products can be qualified on it and hopefully ship with Bullseye preinstalled For “current” products I guess we
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 6/10/20 4:52 AM, Michael Kesper wrote: It would be nice if such a thing would be available as an official Debian live cd rescue image. No debian-live currently includes tools like lvm, for example. So you depend on a working network setup for rescueing encrypted partitions etc. Just my 2 cents Michael Sorry for hijacking this thread but Finnix should have lvm2 in its tool chest. I think the best thing about building your own is that you can make it as small or as large as you want it to be. Both Finnix and GRML have documentation on how to customize their images. Its a very nice project.
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Yves-Alexis On 6/6/2020 10:43 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On Fri, 2020-06-05 at 11:58 -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: That's where doing a Debian pre-load would be challenging (which is really where this conversation started). If support for a platform isn't there until 6 to 8 months after it's shipped (or more) then really it's not worth doing a preload (note - I'm not saying it's not worth supporting the platform - that is still important0. Fedora have this somewhat solved by being on the latest of everything, Ubuntu solve it by having their oem image model. Hi Mark and thanks for the nice thread. I have the feeling that support comes late to Lenovo machines because porting efforts start when the machine are actually available and in the hands of willing developpers. That was my experience when I bought my trusty X250 back in 2015. I've documented part of the process (https://www.corsac.net/X250/): because I bought the machine early in its life, support was not perfect (although honestly it was really good) and I had to do some backporting myself, poke some Debian or upstream maintainers here and there. For quite some years now volunteer do that for IBM then Lenovo hardware (and others as well), but obviously they can only do it once they bought it, received it and started playing with it. Lenovo obviously has access to the hardware way earlier, and could thus start the porting effort (which is mostly shared between distributions anyway because work has to be done upstream) and then make sure it propagates to the various supported distro in time for the release. What can be done in the Debian community to help you do that *before* the hardware are in the hand of volunteers, because as you already said that means the laptops work perfectly 6-8 months after the release which is too late. That's a really good question. I was thinking about it over the weekend and I'm not sure what the right answer is here. If Lenovo were able to make systems available earlier who would they go to? How does that work with a community like Debian? If NDAs are involved (which would depend on how early in the process you get HW) is that a problem? My plan before this conversation came up was to keep an eye on what fixes were needed to get things working on the Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL front and then once those were upstream work on getting those pulled into Debian. Obviously having more competent people than myself do that process and be able to test it directly would speed things up (a lot :)) but that's potentially a bunch of work to place on a few people (due to limited HW). On the plus side - my understanding is that whoever worked on it would get to keep the HW...don't know if that is tempting or not :) I think it's very important for Lenovo to become active and competent contributors to the community. I don't think it is healthy for us to just dump HW and say "please fix" - we really should be contributing to the community for our HW. Maybe a hybrid model where some Debian folk with some time and interest get HW and are willing to mentor/support? I'm guessing the first couple of platforms would be more challenging but in theory it would get easier and less demanding (hopefully :))? Anyway - if there was interest we could explore what was involved with choosing a couple of platforms, getting them to a Debian developer or two and going from there. I don't know how early in the process we'd be able to make HW available - it is *really* hard to get hold of these early systems (based on personal experience). That's a challenge I'm willing to take on if it's something that there is interest in. Mark
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi all, On 10.06.20 01:59, RP wrote: > On 6/9/20 12:19 PM, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> use the install disk as an all around rescue disk. >> You can - there's a "rescue mode" if you look in the boot menus... >> > That's true, but I was looking for more tools than what busybox comes with. > Like an all purpose installer/rescue disk. The suggestions above like Finnix > and Grml gave me an idea - make my own with debian-live. I now have my own > custom live cd for rescuing systems with only the tools I personally need. > It would be nice if such a thing would be available as an official Debian live cd rescue image. No debian-live currently includes tools like lvm, for example. So you depend on a working network setup for rescueing encrypted partitions etc. Just my 2 cents Michael signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 6/9/20 12:19 PM, Steve McIntyre wrote: use the install disk as an all around rescue disk. You can - there's a "rescue mode" if you look in the boot menus... That's true, but I was looking for more tools than what busybox comes with. Like an all purpose installer/rescue disk. The suggestions above like Finnix and Grml gave me an idea - make my own with debian-live. I now have my own custom live cd for rescuing systems with only the tools I personally need.
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 10:24:53AM -0700, RP wrote: >On 6/9/20 8:08 AM, Marc Haber wrote: >> >> Why would we want to do that when downstream distributions for this >> purpose are available. Frankly, I don't currently see that a Debian >> rescue image could reach grml's level of matureness in time. We do have >> more important things to spend our personpower on that are not alreadys >> solved downstream. >> >> Greetings >> Marc >> >This makes sense. I for one was looking for something ala Arch where we can >use the install disk as an all around rescue disk. You can - there's a "rescue mode" if you look in the boot menus... -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.st...@einval.com "I suspect most samba developers are already technically insane... Of course, since many of them are Australians, you can't tell." -- Linus Torvalds
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 6/9/20 8:08 AM, Marc Haber wrote: Why would we want to do that when downstream distributions for this purpose are available. Frankly, I don't currently see that a Debian rescue image could reach grml's level of matureness in time. We do have more important things to spend our personpower on that are not alreadys solved downstream. Greetings Marc This makes sense. I for one was looking for something ala Arch where we can use the install disk as an all around rescue disk.
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Quoting Marc Haber (2020-06-09 17:08:25) > On Sat, Jun 06, 2020 at 03:09:26AM +, Paul Wise wrote: > > Debian used to publish a "recovery" variant of Debian Live, but that > > was dropped due to lack of maintenance at one point. I note there are > > several Debian derivatives producing rescue/recovery live media (Grml, > > rescatux, Finnix come to mind), I wonder if any of them would be > > interested in forming a new Debian rescue/recovery team to publish > > console and GUI recovery variants of Debian Live images. > > Why would we want to do that when downstream distributions for this > purpose are available. Frankly, I don't currently see that a Debian > rescue image could reach grml's level of matureness in time. We do have > more important things to spend our personpower on that are not alreadys > solved downstream. Seems to me you are both talking about same thing with different words: Downstream has already implemented this. How about asking those downstream developers if they might be interested in "upporting" their work so that it is a) implemented in Debian itself and therefore benefits both Debian and all of its downstreams, and b) is done by those already experienced with this without repeating effort. (please, either of you, correct me if I am missing something) - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private signature.asc Description: signature
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Sat, Jun 06, 2020 at 03:09:26AM +, Paul Wise wrote: > Debian used to publish a "recovery" variant of Debian Live, but that > was dropped due to lack of maintenance at one point. I note there are > several Debian derivatives producing rescue/recovery live media (Grml, > rescatux, Finnix come to mind), I wonder if any of them would be > interested in forming a new Debian rescue/recovery team to publish > console and GUI recovery variants of Debian Live images. Why would we want to do that when downstream distributions for this purpose are available. Frankly, I don't currently see that a Debian rescue image could reach grml's level of matureness in time. We do have more important things to spend our personpower on that are not alreadys solved downstream. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany| lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA256 On Fri, 2020-06-05 at 11:58 -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: > That's where doing a Debian pre-load would be challenging (which is > really where this conversation started). If support for a platform isn't > there until 6 to 8 months after it's shipped (or more) then really it's > not worth doing a preload (note - I'm not saying it's not worth > supporting the platform - that is still important0. Fedora have this > somewhat solved by being on the latest of everything, Ubuntu solve it by > having their oem image model. Hi Mark and thanks for the nice thread. I have the feeling that support comes late to Lenovo machines because porting efforts start when the machine are actually available and in the hands of willing developpers. That was my experience when I bought my trusty X250 back in 2015. I've documented part of the process (https://www.corsac.net/X250/): because I bought the machine early in its life, support was not perfect (although honestly it was really good) and I had to do some backporting myself, poke some Debian or upstream maintainers here and there. For quite some years now volunteer do that for IBM then Lenovo hardware (and others as well), but obviously they can only do it once they bought it, received it and started playing with it. Lenovo obviously has access to the hardware way earlier, and could thus start the porting effort (which is mostly shared between distributions anyway because work has to be done upstream) and then make sure it propagates to the various supported distro in time for the release. What can be done in the Debian community to help you do that *before* the hardware are in the hand of volunteers, because as you already said that means the laptops work perfectly 6-8 months after the release which is too late. Regards, - -- Yves-Alexis -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQEzBAEBCAAdFiEE8vi34Qgfo83x35gF3rYcyPpXRFsFAl7bq54ACgkQ3rYcyPpX RFuEVAgA5wqtUvqlGN09wr5UR4Bf+sUldUwFjxF/3/LhJGYQgXXkyMWlhwdiFSl4 MO86xmX+2Pag0ZxdKmwkEtswH/Zr4tBHfAFUI2rnKfSqNq47qF1w9NXjFWMOjTB5 QpXrGdtHn3o9gpb0qAGCHQpdl74gkH+bqO4Gieb8NelIDej9xgNookyJDkK/ADJq i0JLst5GUHVJSFoLTIW0S3Odl4+rr80xvn8rumKTXj8AaarO7TVzE1nM5uG+xQb3 tTJ3tX5UhBAMezlR23lLNPQKtqJ2PKxjq9OEi5hFKzagersqqRIOb3AEXlvjFf/A k6/QjCbm6CECcuypI3L6pCsL/yldRQ== =KjIh -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 7:46 PM Philip Hands wrote: > Of course, Grml isn't a direct output of the Debian project, so perhaps > people might take issue with having that as the "Debian Recovery > Option", but it is closely based on Debian, and includes a couple of > ways of installing vanilla Debian, having booted into Grml. Debian used to publish a "recovery" variant of Debian Live, but that was dropped due to lack of maintenance at one point. I note there are several Debian derivatives producing rescue/recovery live media (Grml, rescatux, Finnix come to mind), I wonder if any of them would be interested in forming a new Debian rescue/recovery team to publish console and GUI recovery variants of Debian Live images. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Mark Pearson writes: >>> 3. Rescue partition >>> >>> Laptop manufacturers usually don't ship with physical media anymore. >>> Instead, the laptops have a rescue partition on them for >>> re-installing/resetting the machine. >>> >>> As far as I know both installers we currently use in Debian are fine >>> from installing from a rescue partition, we just need a nice way to set >>> that up when initially performing an oem style setup from our >>> installation media. (again, not a huge technical problem, but probably a >>> bit more work than #2). > Actually I have an ongoing exercise to improve the recovery side of > things with a meeting later this afternoon. You could do a lot worse than providing a copy of Grml on the disk: https://grml.org/ Of course, Grml isn't a direct output of the Debian project, so perhaps people might take issue with having that as the "Debian Recovery Option", but it is closely based on Debian, and includes a couple of ways of installing vanilla Debian, having booted into Grml. Then again, Grml inherits anyi problems with unsupported hardware that Debian has, so may need things fixed before it's suitable, depending on the current issues on any particular hardware. Cheers, Phil. [ Typed on my X230 :-) ] -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg,GERMANY signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 2020-06-05 12:12, Mark Pearson wrote: > You will be able to buy a Linux system > (albeit not Debian) soon. That's fine with me! If a notebook computer works with any Linux, I'm confident, that I/someone can put Debian on it!
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Martin On 6/5/2020 11:03 AM, Martin wrote: On 2020-06-03 13:39, Mark Pearson wrote: I'm the linux technical lead at Lenovo for the PC team and I'd *love* to improve the Debian experience on Lenovo platforms. Very welcome! Just to add some praise here: I'm using X220 at home and X220 at work, one with Debian testing, one with Debian stable. Both work very well. X220 is still the perfect computer for me. If one ever breaks, I'll try to get a used, second hand X220, again. Now a critical remark: Last time, when I had to buy a Lenovo notebook computer for a colleague in DE, it was not possible to select one without MS Windows. That option was only available for university students. Why do we have to pay the Gates tax? That is definitely getting fixed. (though I'm intrigued about the university student deal - that's not something I had heard of) You may have seen the announcement a couple of days ago about the RHEL/Ubuntu full certification of workstation platforms. There will be other bits of news coming out soon too. You will be able to buy a Linux system (albeit not Debian) soon. As a note (it's usually the next question) - I don't know the pricing details but I'm hoping it will be announced in the not too distant future. Mark
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Marc On 6/5/2020 9:51 AM, Marc Haber wrote: On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 09:13:39AM -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: On 6/5/2020 5:03 AM, Pirate Praveen wrote: While we're asking for rainbow colored unicorns here, I'd love the Lenovo support organiation to be a little less bitchy when one admits using Linux, at least for clear hardware faults like broken mouse buttons etc¹, and can I please have the old keyboard style back as an option? And please keep in mind that Linux nerds enjoy tinkering around with their older hardware, so it would be great to have disk slots that conform to the standard and memory that is not soldered in. I have been holding back buying a new Thinkpad for a while because I hate to lose the flexibility that the older series used to have, and I have bought my last three Thinkpads without a support package because Lenovo won't help me anyway because I happen to use the wrong OS. Rainbow colored unicorns are my favourite (though I don't recommend trying to get a jar of unicorn snot through airport security as a gift for your kids after a business trip...) I've been having conversations with the support team recently as they will be supporting Linux calls. It should address some of your concerns there. I suspect there will be a learning curve. HW design - I don't get much say in that but I can pass on feedback. Greetings Marc, writing this on the X260, with three T520 and one X121e in daily use ¹ it really sucks to be required to have a disk with a never-used Windows installation sitting on the shelf just to make the support tech happy
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Paul On 6/5/2020 9:28 AM, Paul Wise wrote: On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:20 PM Mark Pearson wrote: I haven't so far got as far as thinking about the backporting stage so I probably need more education there. My goal so far has been to get fixes from upstream into sid so that Debian users can pick them up from there. It sounds like you are saying that the Linux kernel release cycle (every 2-3 months) plus the time it takes them to get into Debian is too slow for Lenovo. While Debian sid is waiting for the next Linux kernel release, it does get updated with Linux kernel stable releases, which get fixes that are backported from the next Linux kernel release. I guess that this might work for some of those fixes, but it would not work for new drivers or new features etc. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-kernel-rules.html It's probably one of the more challenging parts (along with getting the support upstream in the first place). It's something that is hard to solve in the other distro's too - RHEL for instance also has issues with the audio on the X1C7/X1C8 as it was upstream too late for their 8.2 release (we've addressed it there with a Lenovo copr repository until it's accepted into RHEL). The balance between maintaining stability and cutting edge hardware is hard to solve. That's where doing a Debian pre-load would be challenging (which is really where this conversation started). If support for a platform isn't there until 6 to 8 months after it's shipped (or more) then really it's not worth doing a preload (note - I'm not saying it's not worth supporting the platform - that is still important0. Fedora have this somewhat solved by being on the latest of everything, Ubuntu solve it by having their oem image model. My naive aim starting to work with Debian was to get patches/fixes into sid and then figure out the rest from there - I tend to approach one hurdle at a time because my brain is too small to cope with more than that :) At least once it was in sid I could tell Debian users there was a way to get the fix on their platform (albeit with the stability risks - most users I have talked to seem OK with that). I'm wide open to suggestions on how to improve that or help/contribute towards improving that. Mark
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On 2020-06-03 13:39, Mark Pearson wrote: > I'm the linux technical lead at Lenovo for the PC team and I'd *love* to > improve the Debian experience on Lenovo platforms. Very welcome! Just to add some praise here: I'm using X220 at home and X220 at work, one with Debian testing, one with Debian stable. Both work very well. X220 is still the perfect computer for me. If one ever breaks, I'll try to get a used, second hand X220, again. Now a critical remark: Last time, when I had to buy a Lenovo notebook computer for a colleague in DE, it was not possible to select one without MS Windows. That option was only available for university students. Why do we have to pay the Gates tax? Cheers
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 9:13 am, Mark Pearson wrote: Hi Pirate On 6/5/2020 5:03 AM, Pirate Praveen wrote: Hi Mark, I also use a Thinkpad (X240) with Debian unstable, it mostly work except for some issues with touchpad and suspend (touchpad stops working after resuming from suspend, but I work around it using an external mouse). OK - I'll see if I can find out about that. We previously had a similar issue on the X1C7 and that was fixed by a touchpad firmware update. I don't have a X240 myself but I'll see what I can find. Thanks! As someone who maintains a package that moves too fast for debian (gitlab which does not provide security updates to a release after 3 months) and part of the team that maintains https://fasttrack.debian.net, I am happy to help you here. That's really interesting - thanks for pointing it out. I can see that being really useful - though I have to get my head around a bit more how/when it is used. We have offcial backports for packages that are already in testing (which will be in next stable release), but packages like gitlab which cannot be supported in the lifetime of a normal stable release cannot be in testing and consequently cannot be in official backports. So we created a new repository for packages like gitlab which changes too fast and connot be in stable or backports. It is still an unofficial project and based on how it gets acceptance in the community, it could become an official project later (backports was also started as an unofficial project initially). I also mentor a lot of new contributors to Debian, so feel free to ask me about any Debian issues and processes. I'm not an expert in drivers and hardware, but I can definitely help with backporting part. We could use fasttrack to make things available sooner to stable users if regular backports are not possible. Thank you - that is very much appreciated. I haven't so far got as far as thinking about the backporting stage so I probably need more education there. My goal so far has been to get fixes from upstream into sid so that Debian users can pick them up from there. But being able to backport them from there would be brilliant. $ rmadison linux-image-amd64 [older releases skipped] linux-image-amd64 | 4.19+105+deb10u4| stable | amd64 linux-image-amd64 | 5.5.17-1~bpo10+1| buster-backports | amd64 linux-image-amd64 | 5.6.14-1| testing | amd64 linux-image-amd64 | 5.6.14-1| unstable | amd64 linux-image-amd64 | 5.7~rc5-1~exp1 | experimental | amd64 As you can see buster-backports already has linux kernel 5.5, even though stable is still at 4.19. But as Ansgar pointed out here[1], it is still not very smooth experience and is fine for a server app like gitlab, but we need more polish for this to be usable to not very technical users or find other ways like he mentioned, add as extra package to normal update. But if your expectation is for people who can pick up from sid, I think picking from backports would be easier. [1]https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2020/06/msg00019.html
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 09:13:39AM -0400, Mark Pearson wrote: > On 6/5/2020 5:03 AM, Pirate Praveen wrote: > > I also use a Thinkpad (X240) with Debian unstable, it mostly work except > > for some issues with touchpad and suspend (touchpad stops working after > > resuming from suspend, but I work around it using an external mouse). > > > OK - I'll see if I can find out about that. We previously had a similar > issue on the X1C7 and that was fixed by a touchpad firmware update. I don't > have a X240 myself but I'll see what I can find. Generally, the [TX][245]40 series was not a very good machine regarding Linux, like the older T61[p] line. Things have become a lot better again since then, my X260 works like a charm, the T450 and T460 I had from my last customers were ok as well. Generally, T- and X-Thinkpads are a very good choice for Linux, very popular and widely recommended inside the Community. While we're asking for rainbow colored unicorns here, I'd love the Lenovo support organiation to be a little less bitchy when one admits using Linux, at least for clear hardware faults like broken mouse buttons etc¹, and can I please have the old keyboard style back as an option? And please keep in mind that Linux nerds enjoy tinkering around with their older hardware, so it would be great to have disk slots that conform to the standard and memory that is not soldered in. I have been holding back buying a new Thinkpad for a while because I hate to lose the flexibility that the older series used to have, and I have bought my last three Thinkpads without a support package because Lenovo won't help me anyway because I happen to use the wrong OS. Greetings Marc, writing this on the X260, with three T520 and one X121e in daily use ¹ it really sucks to be required to have a disk with a never-used Windows installation sitting on the shelf just to make the support tech happy -- - Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany| lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 1:20 PM Mark Pearson wrote: > I haven't so far got as far as thinking about the backporting stage so I > probably need more education there. My goal so far has been to get fixes > from upstream into sid so that Debian users can pick them up from there. It sounds like you are saying that the Linux kernel release cycle (every 2-3 months) plus the time it takes them to get into Debian is too slow for Lenovo. While Debian sid is waiting for the next Linux kernel release, it does get updated with Linux kernel stable releases, which get fixes that are backported from the next Linux kernel release. I guess that this might work for some of those fixes, but it would not work for new drivers or new features etc. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-kernel-rules.html -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Pirate On 6/5/2020 5:03 AM, Pirate Praveen wrote: Hi Mark, I also use a Thinkpad (X240) with Debian unstable, it mostly work except for some issues with touchpad and suspend (touchpad stops working after resuming from suspend, but I work around it using an external mouse). OK - I'll see if I can find out about that. We previously had a similar issue on the X1C7 and that was fixed by a touchpad firmware update. I don't have a X240 myself but I'll see what I can find. As someone who maintains a package that moves too fast for debian (gitlab which does not provide security updates to a release after 3 months) and part of the team that maintains https://fasttrack.debian.net, I am happy to help you here. That's really interesting - thanks for pointing it out. I can see that being really useful - though I have to get my head around a bit more how/when it is used. I also mentor a lot of new contributors to Debian, so feel free to ask me about any Debian issues and processes. I'm not an expert in drivers and hardware, but I can definitely help with backporting part. We could use fasttrack to make things available sooner to stable users if regular backports are not possible. Thank you - that is very much appreciated. I haven't so far got as far as thinking about the backporting stage so I probably need more education there. My goal so far has been to get fixes from upstream into sid so that Debian users can pick them up from there. But being able to backport them from there would be brilliant.
RE: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 1:39 pm, Mark Pearson wrote: From my point of view what I've been trying to do is to get more involved so I can contribute/backport fixes directly. I get good insight into what issues impact our platforms and when fixes land upstream. It seems the best way to make contribute and make a difference. Unfortunately I've still got a *lot* of learning to do and it's a really slow process because the loop between offering a fix, getting it reviewed to find out what you did wrong and contributing the update is crazy slow (for example I have kernel MR 240 open for four weeks for an OLED brightness issue that a lot of users think is important). My expectation is that as I make fewer mistakes and earn some trust that will help - but until that point (which I'm guessing will take years ) I have limited handles that I can pull on to make things happen. My *impression* is there is limited desire to accelerate fixes for Lenovo platforms - I suspect mostly because people are just plenty busy with the things they care about instead and I understand that. Hi Mark, I also use a Thinkpad (X240) with Debian unstable, it mostly work except for some issues with touchpad and suspend (touchpad stops working after resuming from suspend, but I work around it using an external mouse). As someone who maintains a package that moves too fast for debian (gitlab which does not provide security updates to a release after 3 months) and part of the team that maintains https://fasttrack.debian.net, I am happy to help you here. I also mentor a lot of new contributors to Debian, so feel free to ask me about any Debian issues and processes. I'm not an expert in drivers and hardware, but I can definitely help with backporting part. We could use fasttrack to make things available sooner to stable users if regular backports are not possible. A shout out for Hector Martinez who has been helping me a whole bunch. Without his help I likely would have given up and wouldn't even be reading the threads on this forum. If there are more people like Hector (particularly in kernel, audio and graphics) let me know! This email took me a long time to write - I'm *very* aware that I'm new to this and don't want to cause offence. Please take all of the above with the recognition that my viewpoint into Debian is still limited and if I've said anything dumb/wrong/offensive let me know so I can learn what I'm missing. Mark
Re: Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi, Thank you for your mail. In short term, Lenovo cannot provide Debian pre-installed laptops since there are some blockers for it. But they want to give better experience with Linux for their laptop users, including Debian. So, we can continue to talk with them, will try to find the root cause of those problems and solve it. (Maybe it's better to have cross-distro talk about its laptop issue, too). Can we do that? Yes, of course improve it :) -- Hideki Yamane
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
❦ 4 juin 2020 00:35 +00, Paul Wise: >> Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see >> you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to >> help you on this package and get it uploaded. > > Unfortunately SOF firmware, while it has freely licensed source code, > is not (very) useful to package properly (reproducibly built from > source etc) for Debian. The issue is that many devices require the > firmware binaries to have an Intel signature on them, so even though > we have freely licensed source code, we do not have the four freedoms > since we cannot upload our own firmware binaries onto the audio > devices. So the best option here is for Intel to do the building and > signing and get them included in linux-firmware and then Debian pull > the latest version of that. Unfortunately, updating firmware-nonfree is difficult: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=949019 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=962134 Also, related to Lenovo, a more recent version of iwlwifi is also needed to get a stable wifi. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=942563 I have also updated the firmwares for the GPU in hope of getting a better stability during the 5.3/5.4 era. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931930 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956221 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956658 With the dock and a recent kernel, I also need a firmware for the Realtek NIC chipset (I didn't bother to open an issue). Ben just doesn't have time to do updates. However, checking the git repository, I see there may be a release in progress. So we could squeeze the SOF firmwares here. https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/firmware-nonfree/-/commits/master -- If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. -- J.R.R. Tolkien signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 7:51 PM Vincent Bernat wrote: > Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see > you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to > help you on this package and get it uploaded. Unfortunately SOF firmware, while it has freely licensed source code, is not (very) useful to package properly (reproducibly built from source etc) for Debian. The issue is that many devices require the firmware binaries to have an Intel signature on them, so even though we have freely licensed source code, we do not have the four freedoms since we cannot upload our own firmware binaries onto the audio devices. So the best option here is for Intel to do the building and signing and get them included in linux-firmware and then Debian pull the latest version of that. More details in the links on this page: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open Mark, do you know if Lenovo devices require Intel signatures on the audio firmware? -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Jonathan On 6/3/2020 4:40 PM, Jonathan Carter wrote: Hey Mark On 2020/06/03 20:24, Mark Pearson wrote: In my mind the best long term solution for Debian is if Lenovo are contributing fixes ourselves - after all we usually know what the fixes are. We're not technically at the stage where that is doable though - but it's what I'm aiming for and I'm the trial guinea-pig. Fantastic! Yes feel free to reach out to me any time if you need some help. I can give some guidance with Debian procedures or can help you with sponsoring fixes, patches and package uploads, but what I can't do is pressure someone in a team to prioritise an issue or force them to accept a patch that they don't want, but I think in general, people will be supportive in getting issues solved to get Debian on an OEM laptop (and fixing these issues in Debian helps for all our existing ThinkPad users too). That sounds awesome. And agreed - I would never want to pressure picking up patches that are wrong. My general mantra to *anybody* in open source for any of our Linux offerings is if you see us doing anything crappy let me know as it's very important to me that we do things right. I think any open source collaboration has to be correct for both sides or it will just get shunned. My expectation is anything I ask for is upstream so I can't see asking for anything controversial :) For me the first step would be an understanding that if we propose a patch then we're doing it for a good reason and it doesn't sit there for a couple of months. I did another talk over the last weekend in our first ever online MiniDebConf where I talked about our patch backlog, we definitely want to get better at this. I don't think we're at the stage where you can trust us to merge things in without review but longer term I'd hope to be a more trusted community member who can be relied on to deliver quality items. How we get from here to there is in my mind the challenge - for that we need support and I appreciate peoples time is limited and very precious :) Nice! If you're interested, it would be great for you to join us a full fledged project member too. That takes a lot of work, but in the meantime we also have a status called Debian Maintainer where you're allowed to upload some packages without any supervision before you're a full Debian Developer. I would be really interested in this. This month is crazy with planning for the web release (too many meetings...) but Debian is important and I'd like to make time for it. Let me know what the recommended steps are. So far I've been raising bugs and doing a few kernel merge requests (and in the process of that asking Hector probably too many questions about how to do kernel tasks) I think we generally care about the hardware that we have, and that our employers typically buy and deploy. I think "other people's hardware problems" will always be less exciting than your own. Usually when more of the latest hardware starts hitting us personally we tend to care more. I think part of this is just natural. Agreed. I'm afraid from a Lenovo preload shipping point of view it has to be the latest HW though and that's a challenge. If it's any consolation, whilst I have access to a lot of devices I also have to fight for some HW access. I don't have an X1C8 yet (my colleague doesI'm not bitter ;)) Getting HW where it needs to be is one of the big challenges I face generally. I understand. From a preload point of view, I suppose it's possible to start off with a subset of laptops that might work well? Or is there a strong preference from Lenovo to support a wide range from the start (I noticed that that's what Fedora did, so just wanted to check). I think a subset is almost certainly the way to realistically go but I'll discuss internally. As I'm sure you appreciate this stuff doesn't happen overnight :) With Fedora on both sides we're still learning what works and doesn't for their community. We also need to gauge customer interest and there is a cost in Lenovo for every preload we do - we have internal testing, manufacturing and support costs that apply so it has to be worth it. I'm hoping it's a no-brainer. Mark
Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hey Mark On 2020/06/03 20:24, Mark Pearson wrote: >>> 1. Support >>> >>> I'm not sure what you did in the case with Fedora, but my guess is you >>> have some agreement with how to handle support calls for Fedora on the >>> system. Debian isn't backed by any one company, and in the immediate >>> future our usual community support channels might be as good as it gets. >>> I suppose if users know this, understand this, and know what they're >>> getting, then this becomes less of an issue. >>> > So - I'm kinda nervous about the support side to see what happens as we > enable websales. Up until now it's just been corporate customers and > best effort support on our Lenovo Linux forums. > We will provide support for HW related aspects of the platforms and > genuinely we're waiting to see how bad or good it's going to be. > For OS stuff that isn't HW related (e.g. the calendar app crashes) then > we'll point more at the community. My hope is that Linux users are more > technically aware and will be reasonableWe will see what happens but > it is a bit of an unknown. > I'm spending a fair chunk of time at the moment following up with the > Lenovo support team getting them familiar with the basics of Linux. Yeah I had flashbacks to the netbook era where lots of people bought Linux netbooks and were confused that it didn't run Linux (and the famous story of the young woman who accidentally bought a Dell machine with Ubuntu which caused her to drop out of college - https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/woman-claims-ubuntu-kept-her-from-online-classes.html) At least a lot has changed and an increasing number of the general public are becoming aware that there's something else than "Mac and Windows". If it was my webshop I'd probably make a final pop-up if they choose Linux with a table that says, "You chose a Linux system, here's the difference between Linux and Windows" with a "yes, continue", "No, take me back". Not to discourage anyone from getting a Linux system on it, but as I mentioned in my talk I'd be concerned that just a few RMAs might discourage an OEM from further shipping a distro. Sorry, I'm just thinking out loudly above, I hope it all works out ok! >>> 3. Rescue partition >>> >>> Laptop manufacturers usually don't ship with physical media anymore. >>> Instead, the laptops have a rescue partition on them for >>> re-installing/resetting the machine. >>> >>> As far as I know both installers we currently use in Debian are fine >>> from installing from a rescue partition, we just need a nice way to set >>> that up when initially performing an oem style setup from our >>> installation media. (again, not a huge technical problem, but probably a >>> bit more work than #2). > > Actually I have an ongoing exercise to improve the recovery side of > things with a meeting later this afternoon. > > For Fedora given what we are providing is just Fedora + some docs then > the recovery solution is currently "go install Fedora using their USB > installer and the docs are on the support site if you really want them". > It's not the best but it's what we have. Ah, good to know that this isn't as essential as I thought. > We raise bugs the normal way with Fedora. They weren't public before the > announcement but we're moving to doing things in a more standard public > way. We have the advantage that a bug on Fedora is usually something > RHEL wants so it's easy to get attention and that would be something > Debian would need to consider. We did get input for their bug triaging > but ultimately it was for the community to decide what was a blocker or > not and I didn't win every battle. There was an audio over HDMI nouveau > driver issue that got fixed after F32 was released - users will get that > just as part of their regular update and that's OK. Ah I've typed several paragraphs several times and deleted it, drivers are a big issue, I guess we can take that topic further off of -project :) > In my mind the best long term solution for Debian is if Lenovo are > contributing fixes ourselves - after all we usually know what the fixes > are. We're not technically at the stage where that is doable though - > but it's what I'm aiming for and I'm the trial guinea-pig. Fantastic! Yes feel free to reach out to me any time if you need some help. I can give some guidance with Debian procedures or can help you with sponsoring fixes, patches and package uploads, but what I can't do is pressure someone in a team to prioritise an issue or force them to accept a patch that they don't want, but I think in general, people will be supportive in getting issues solved to get Debian on an OEM laptop (and fixing these issues in Debian helps for all our existing ThinkPad users too). > For me the first step would be an understanding that if we propose a > patch then we're doing it for a good reason and it doesn't sit there for > a couple of months. I did another talk over the last weekend in our first ever online MiniDebConf where I
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Vincent On 6/3/2020 3:29 PM, Vincent Bernat wrote: ❦ 3 juin 2020 13:39 +00, Mark Pearson: As an important example - the X1 Carbon 7 (which is a popular machine) still doesn't work well with any version of Debian (including experimental or testing) as the audio is broken. Debian users have to jump through a few hoops to get it to work. I've let the maintainer know a number of times what is involved to fix that but it's obviously not a priority (as a heads up - Debian on most Lenovo 2020 platforms is going to suck because of this too). I'm not meaning to point fingers - but just explain why it feels as if Debian and the latest hardware is an awkward fit. I have the mentioned X1 Carbon. Currently, in unstable, we have the kernel and Alsa. We need to pull PulseAudio from experimental and add a patch. I was hoping PulseAudio upstream would release 13.99.2 for Debian to pick. I can work on getting the patch in Debian in the meantime. That would be amazing. Thank you! Do let me know if I can help in anyway. I'm a very long way from being an audio expert but I got a decent amount of exposure to the SOF side of things over the last few months Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to help you on this package and get it uploaded. Brilliant. Despite having everything, the sound still lacks bass (notably compared to Windows). People are trying various tweaks to get better results, but then headphones don't work anymore. Dunno if this is something you can pull some levers on. There are some information here: https://gist.github.com/hamidzr/dd81e429dc86f4327ded7a2030e7d7d9#gistcomment-3175225 Interesting thread - I'd not seen that one before (and I've seen a fair few threads on the audio issues) We did a bunch of work with Jaroslav Kysela @ RH to tune the audio - we got the audio schematics for him etc. I'm not sure I can share them publicly though - still the hard bit with open source and HW design - sometimes NDA's are still needed. As an aside I wanted some education into what was involved with the tuning so my team could do it for future platforms but wasn't able to get that (it's not just Debian devs who are too busy :)). Anyway - I'll definitely dig thru the thread and see what I can do. If you have ideas on what specific information is needed to get it solved let me know and I can try and dig it up - I have access to the HW team for any information and whilst it sometimes takes a bit of time to get details (they're in Japan and China and it often takes a bit of back and forth to clarify) they're usually pretty good at helping out.
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
❦ 3 juin 2020 13:39 +00, Mark Pearson: > As an important example - the X1 Carbon 7 (which is a popular machine) > still doesn't work well with any version of Debian (including > experimental or testing) as the audio is broken. Debian users have to > jump through a few hoops to get it to work. I've let the maintainer > know a number of times what is involved to fix that but it's obviously > not a priority (as a heads up - Debian on most Lenovo 2020 platforms > is going to suck because of this too). I'm not meaning to point > fingers - but just explain why it feels as if Debian and the latest > hardware is an awkward fit. I have the mentioned X1 Carbon. Currently, in unstable, we have the kernel and Alsa. We need to pull PulseAudio from experimental and add a patch. I was hoping PulseAudio upstream would release 13.99.2 for Debian to pick. I can work on getting the patch in Debian in the meantime. Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to help you on this package and get it uploaded. Despite having everything, the sound still lacks bass (notably compared to Windows). People are trying various tweaks to get better results, but then headphones don't work anymore. Dunno if this is something you can pull some levers on. There are some information here: https://gist.github.com/hamidzr/dd81e429dc86f4327ded7a2030e7d7d9#gistcomment-3175225 -- Replace repetitive expressions by calls to a common function. - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger) signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: FW: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Jonathan Thanks for the follow up. Also - apologies as I realised I used my non-linux friendly email account for my original posting with all the horrible outlook mangling. I'm posting this from my alternative account which avoids outlook (I'm just transitioning between the two accounts...) On 6/3/2020 1:23 PM, Mark Pearson wrote: -Original Message- From: Jonathan Carter Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 11:54 AM Hi Mark! On 2020/06/03 15:39, Mark Pearson wrote: I guess it should be possible, but the biggest challenge is probably to get the right contact to talk with. Do we have such a contact ? I started replying to this thread late last night and after a few iterations I gave up and went to bed Here goes attempt 5 First of all, thanks for the great e-mail and making the time to reach out. By way of introduction, I'm the current Debian Project Leader (since a bit more than a month now) and I am happy to be available to help speed things up, feel free to reach out to me personally at any time if you're frustrated with getting something done in Debian. Congrats on the DPL - I did follow that process :) Short answer - you have the right contact. I'm the linux technical lead at Lenovo for the PC team and I'd *love* to improve the Debian experience on Lenovo platforms. It's something I have actively been trying to work on for the last 9 months (with limited success). I'm really happy to see this question and the responses - I would really like to have this conversation with the wider community as to what Lenovo and Debian can do to work better together. Debian is an important distro with a lot of users and an amazing community. I was hoping to be at Debconf 2020 and use that as an opportunity to actually get to meet Debian devs as frankly email has been working poorly and maintainers are just very busy people. Sadly I think Covid has likely stomped on that plan. Talking at DC20 would've been great, but we can also talk via email and video calls in the meantime! I'd be totally up for that. So and let me start the ball rolling by highlighting some good and bad: The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open source projects. I'm an open source user and a lot of what I see from Lenovo internally is positive and makes me very happy to advocate for what they are doing. Sometimes our process is a bit slow but there is a commitment to doing Linux and doing it right which I'm personally excited by. The Fedora collaboration has worked really well - I think for both sides (obviously talk to your Fedora colleagues for their perspective). They have been a really positive community to work with and it's been productive showing that Lenovo can collaborate with an OS community in the right way. Internally at Lenovo there is still a lot of learning about Linux and how it works - and that is happening. Linux is catching on - I have more customer engagements and our Linux sales have been increasing and we haven't turned our websales on yet (coming soon ) The bad - I love Debian but I don't think as a distro you are ready or capable for being pre-loaded on our platforms. I can explain why and I'm very happy to be corrected but more importantly if it can be solved then we can for sure explore the next steps - that would make me really happy! I 100% agree with you, in my first talk as DPL, this is even a topic that I've covered when talking with the Brazillian Debian community: https://peertube.debian.social/videos/watch/cdfe5b24-e3ad-4422-a6f2- 15ca4fffd895?start=43m52s (I talk about this for about 5 minutes, and it was almost midnight and I was up since 5am so sorry for maybe being a bit incoherent at times) Awesome - I just watched the video and you make some great points and I think there are a bunch of questions in there that I can answer - or that we're actively working on. Anyway, let me summarize what I said on the topic in that video with some additional notes. Firstly, I think the typical Debian developer might not care about Debian being available on an OEM laptop per sé. First thing that most of us would probably do is to re-install it from official installation media :) But there's probably a vast amount of Debian users out there that would want a Debian on their ThinkPad pre-configured. And we'd be delighted from the Debian side if we could help make that happen. So in the video I posted some of the initial thoughts that I think we need to sort out in Debian before we can even start thinking about this. I'm glad you reached out because you'll be able to give us much better insight for sure, but at least I have some video evidence to
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Mark, On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 9:02 AM Jonathan Carter wrote: > > My x250 is 5 years old So is my T450s, and it's not the first. Lenovo and Debian are a great combo. Thanks for taking this initiative! Kind regards Felix Lechner
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 05:53:50PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote: > Hi Mark! [...] This is from the peanut gallery, from a simple Debian user. Thanks you both for this delightful exchange. This is one of the things why I love Debian -- running, BTW, on a thinkpad, which is an awesome machine, too (admittedly not the newes one, a 230, but my current income situation wouldn't justify more. And, I'm totally happy with that combo. So cheers to you both -- tomás signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi Mark! On 2020/06/03 15:39, Mark Pearson wrote: >> I guess it should be possible, but the biggest challenge is probably to >> get the right contact to talk with. Do we have such a contact ? >> > I started replying to this thread late last night and after a few iterations > I gave up and went to bed Here goes attempt 5 First of all, thanks for the great e-mail and making the time to reach out. By way of introduction, I'm the current Debian Project Leader (since a bit more than a month now) and I am happy to be available to help speed things up, feel free to reach out to me personally at any time if you're frustrated with getting something done in Debian. > Short answer - you have the right contact. I'm the linux technical lead at > Lenovo for the PC team and I'd *love* to improve the Debian experience on > Lenovo platforms. It's something I have actively been trying to work on for > the last 9 months (with limited success). I'm really happy to see this > question and the responses - I would really like to have this conversation > with the wider community as to what Lenovo and Debian can do to work better > together. Debian is an important distro with a lot of users and an amazing > community. I was hoping to be at Debconf 2020 and use that as an opportunity > to actually get to meet Debian devs as frankly email has been working poorly > and maintainers are just very busy people. Sadly I think Covid has likely > stomped on that plan. Talking at DC20 would've been great, but we can also talk via email and video calls in the meantime! > So and let me start the ball rolling by highlighting some good and bad: > > The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big > announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with > Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream > including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet > but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open > source projects. > I'm an open source user and a lot of what I see from Lenovo internally is > positive and makes me very happy to advocate for what they are doing. > Sometimes our process is a bit slow but there is a commitment to doing Linux > and doing it right which I'm personally excited by. The Fedora collaboration > has worked really well - I think for both sides (obviously talk to your > Fedora colleagues for their perspective). They have been a really positive > community to work with and it's been productive showing that Lenovo can > collaborate with an OS community in the right way. > Internally at Lenovo there is still a lot of learning about Linux and how it > works - and that is happening. Linux is catching on - I have more customer > engagements and our Linux sales have been increasing and we haven't turned > our websales on yet (coming soon ) > > The bad - I love Debian but I don't think as a distro you are ready or > capable for being pre-loaded on our platforms. I can explain why and I'm very > happy to be corrected but more importantly if it can be solved then we can > for sure explore the next steps - that would make me really happy! I 100% agree with you, in my first talk as DPL, this is even a topic that I've covered when talking with the Brazillian Debian community: https://peertube.debian.social/videos/watch/cdfe5b24-e3ad-4422-a6f2-15ca4fffd895?start=43m52s (I talk about this for about 5 minutes, and it was almost midnight and I was up since 5am so sorry for maybe being a bit incoherent at times) Anyway, let me summarize what I said on the topic in that video with some additional notes. Firstly, I think the typical Debian developer might not care about Debian being available on an OEM laptop per sé. First thing that most of us would probably do is to re-install it from official installation media :) But there's probably a vast amount of Debian users out there that would want a Debian on their ThinkPad pre-configured. And we'd be delighted from the Debian side if we could help make that happen. So in the video I posted some of the initial thoughts that I think we need to sort out in Debian before we can even start thinking about this. I'm glad you reached out because you'll be able to give us much better insight for sure, but at least I have some video evidence to prove that we put at least *some* thought in to it :) 1. Support I'm not sure what you did in the case with Fedora, but my guess is you have some agreement with how to handle support calls for Fedora on the system. Debian isn't backed by any one company, and in the immediate future our usual community support channels might be as good as it gets. I suppose if users know this, understand this, and know what they're getting, then this becomes less of an issue. 2. OEM Mode installer Currently we don't have an OEM mode install mode in Debian (that is, skip questions like timezone, user,
RE: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux
Hi > -Original Message- > From: Thomas Goirand > Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2020 8:10 AM > > On 6/3/20 4:30 AM, Hideki Yamane wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I've found an article about Lenovo ships Fedora pre-installed machine. > > https://news.lenovo.com/smarter-technology-for-all-extends-to-the-linux- > community-this-summer/ > > > > At past DebConfs, I saw a lot of ThinkPad devices so many contributors > > love it, and they're even Platinum sponsor for this year. > > Can we talk to them to happen the same thing for Debian? :) > > I guess it should be possible, but the biggest challenge is probably to > get the right contact to talk with. Do we have such a contact ? > I started replying to this thread late last night and after a few iterations I gave up and went to bed Here goes attempt 5 Short answer - you have the right contact. I'm the linux technical lead at Lenovo for the PC team and I'd *love* to improve the Debian experience on Lenovo platforms. It's something I have actively been trying to work on for the last 9 months (with limited success). I'm really happy to see this question and the responses - I would really like to have this conversation with the wider community as to what Lenovo and Debian can do to work better together. Debian is an important distro with a lot of users and an amazing community. I was hoping to be at Debconf 2020 and use that as an opportunity to actually get to meet Debian devs as frankly email has been working poorly and maintainers are just very busy people. Sadly I think Covid has likely stomped on that plan. So and let me start the ball rolling by highlighting some good and bad: The good - Lenovo are expanding what they offer on Linux (we had another big announcement yesterday about doing full config on our workstations with Ubuntu and RHEL). We're asking HW vendors to have Linux support upstream including firmware on LVFS which I think is important. It's not perfect yet but it's getting better and better. We're starting to contribute to open source projects. I'm an open source user and a lot of what I see from Lenovo internally is positive and makes me very happy to advocate for what they are doing. Sometimes our process is a bit slow but there is a commitment to doing Linux and doing it right which I'm personally excited by. The Fedora collaboration has worked really well - I think for both sides (obviously talk to your Fedora colleagues for their perspective). They have been a really positive community to work with and it's been productive showing that Lenovo can collaborate with an OS community in the right way. Internally at Lenovo there is still a lot of learning about Linux and how it works - and that is happening. Linux is catching on - I have more customer engagements and our Linux sales have been increasing and we haven't turned our websales on yet (coming soon ) The bad - I love Debian but I don't think as a distro you are ready or capable for being pre-loaded on our platforms. I can explain why and I'm very happy to be corrected but more importantly if it can be solved then we can for sure explore the next steps - that would make me really happy! Debian moves somewhat slowly. The general approach seems to me to be to wait for updates to trickle down from the upstream community and I completely understand that approach - I'm sure it is important to maintaining stability *but* it means that Debian is usually broken on our platforms for the first year they are available because that whole process takes a long time. By the time Debian works it's too late for a pre-loaded offering. As an aside RHEL has the same problem but they put a lot of effort into backporting fixes so that their customers get the fixes - and that infrastructure doesn't seem available on Debian to my limited knowledge. As an important example - the X1 Carbon 7 (which is a popular machine) still doesn't work well with any version of Debian (including experimental or testing) as the audio is broken. Debian users have to jump through a few hoops to get it to work. I've let the maintainer know a number of times what is involved to fix that but it's obviously not a priority (as a heads up - Debian on most Lenovo 2020 platforms is going to suck because of this too). I'm not meaning to point fingers - but just explain why it feels as if Debian and the latest hardware is an awkward fit. From my point of view what I've been trying to do is to get more involved so I can contribute/backport fixes directly. I get good insight into what issues impact our platforms and when fixes land upstream. It seems the best way to make contribute and make a difference. Unfortunately I've still got a *lot* of learning to do and it's a really slow process because the loop between offering a fix, getting it reviewed to find out what you did wrong and contributing the update is crazy slow (for example I have kernel MR 240 open for four weeks for
