Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 on Ubuntu

I recently purchased a Yoga Pro 2 and spent a considerable amount of time setting it up to my liking on Ubuntu. This post summarizes the key steps required in getting the hardware to work properly. Some of these steps are well known and out there on the web, others aren’t.

I used etckeeper to put my /etc folder under version control. This makes it really easy for me to get the full history of the changes I made.

Backlight problem

When you first boot your Yoga Pro 2 on Ubuntu, the screen will be black. That’s because the backlight is off.  You can turn it on temporarily by increasing the brightness with the brightness key, or by adding the acpi_backlight=vendor argument to your kernel in Grub at boot time.

To make this permanent, apply edit this line of your /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

and then run sudo update-grub2. This procedure is also described here.

Wifi and Bluetooth do not work

sudo rmmod ideapad-laptop ought to fix it at run time. To make permanent, run this:

echo blacklist ideapad-laptop | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf

I initially had regular Wifi disconnects on a specific network. I switched from NetworkManager to WICD to address that as explained here. I have since then returned to NetworkManager and have not experienced the problem again (I no longer use this particular Wifi network). Just putting this idea out there in case you're experiencing disconnects.

How to deal with the absurdly high resolution

At run time, try xrandr --output eDP1 --scale 0.5x0.5 where eDP1 is the name of the main output. To make permanent (and also nicer, xrandr scaling doesn’t look good), create a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf with this content:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "eDP1"

    # 1600x900 59.95 Hz (CVT 1.44M9) hsync: 55.99 kHz; pclk: 118.25 MHz
    Modeline "1600x900@60"  118.25  1600 1696 1856 2112  900 903 908 934 -hsync +vsync

    Option "PreferredMode" "1600x900@60"
EndSection

Video tearing

If videos are “tearing“, try creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf with:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "TearFree"    "true"
EndSection

Jumpy trackpad and lack of middle button

Try creating the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf with this content:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    # This option is recommend on all Linux systems using evdev, but cannot be
    # enabled by default. See the following link for details:
    # http://who-t.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-ignore-configuration-errors.html
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

    Option "FingerLow"              "46"
    Option "FingerHigh"             "46"
    Option "ClickFinger1"           "1"
    Option "ClickFinger2"           "2"
    Option "ClickFinger3"           "3"
    Option "TapButton1"             "1"
    Option "TapButton2"             "2"
    Option "TapButton3"             "3"
    Option "AreaBottomEdge"         "85%"
    Option "SoftButtonAreas"        "60% 0 85% 0 40% 60% 85% 0" # Btn2 LRTB - Btn3 LRTB
    Option "EmulateMidButtonTime"   "75"
EndSection

You can play with the values at runtime using synclient.

Closing the lid doesn’t always send the laptop to suspend, this is how to fix

Add these lines to /etc/rc.local:

# Disable wake up on anything for Yoga Pro 2, otherwise it sometimes wakes from suspend
cat /proc/acpi/wakeup |
    grep '*enabled' |
    cut -f 1 -d ' ' |
    xargs -n 1 -I {} sh -c 'echo Disabling wake up on {}... && echo {} > /proc/acpi/wakeup'

Kudos to csslayer for figuring that one out.

Bluetooth mouse disconnects after a few minutes and does not reconnect

This one was sneaky, but the solution is simple, add these lines to your /etc/rc.local

# Prevents the Bluetooth USB card from getting reset which disconnects the mouse
BTUSB_DEV="8087:07dc"
BTUSB_BINDING="$(lsusb -d "$BTUSB_DEV" |
    cut -f 1 -d : |
    sed -e 's,Bus ,,' -e 's, Device ,/,' |
    xargs -I {} udevadm info -q path -n /dev/bus/usb/{} |
    xargs basename)"

echo "Disabling autosuspend for Bluetooth USB Soundcard: $BTUSB_BINDING..."
echo -1 > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/$BTUSB_BINDING/power/autosuspend_delay_ms"

(Use lsusb to confirm that your Bluetooth USB card is indeed 8087:07dc).

I posted about this here.

Crackling sound at the beginning of calls when using the Google Talk plugin

Try running Chromium with this environment variable set: PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30.

UPDATE: Check this out instead.

SSD optimization

Because the storage device on the Yoga Pro 2 is an SSD, you’ll want to read these two pages:

1. How do I optimize the OS for SSDs?
2. How to enable TRIM?

That’s all folks

That’s it for now! It was quite painful to get all this setup but the Yoga Pro 2 is a fantastic piece of hardware so I’m still quite happy with the purchase.

I will continue to update this post with any new fix that I come across.

Please comment if you find other ‘fixes’ for the Yoga Pro 2 on Ubuntu, if you have unsolved problems, or if this article helped you!