Following the demise of my Novatech n1410, I have now taken delivery of a shiny (actually “shiny” is one thing it isn’t!) new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 3. This is not a review of the X1 Carbon - there are plenty of those available already, but merely my experience of the first few days of ownership.

So why did I choose the X1 Carbon?

1. Quality of construction and life expectancy;
2. Ubuntu hardware certification;
3. Screen resolution 2560x1440 - perfect for remote support;
4. Keyboard and Trackpad quality - two of my dissatisfactions with the Novatech;
5. Weight: at 1.3kg - it is much lighter than the Novatech and much of the competition.

The high cost was a concern to me, but having paid £479 for the Novatech and it having only lasted 32 months, I was very conscious that price isn’t everything. I bought the X1 Carbon from BT Business Direct for a touch under £1,000.

When it arrived I was very surprised by the size of the packaging - this was a very small box for something so expensive! The one thing that I was not expecting was to be excited by the looks of this laptop - the words “business-like” best summed up my expectations. In the flesh I found the X1 Carbon absolutely stunning - the photo above is one of the few that I have found that do it justice.

By this point I was as happy as a Frenchman who’s invented self-removing trousers.

Ubuntu Installation

I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04-3 LTS 64-bit and copied it to my iodd 2531 Black USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure Virtual DVD Blu-ray ROM. The Ubuntu installation was flawless and fast. I opted for a whole drive encrypted LVM install and in no time was booting into Ubuntu. The screen was absolutely beautiful - for the first time I had a laptop with a screen to rival an Apple Macbook.

Display Issues

Ubuntu prompted me to run software update (I never update during the install process), which I duly did. Having rebooted - disaster struck - the boot process almost immediately dumped me to this screen. I was able to enter my drive encryption password blind and it then progressed to the beautiful LightDM login screen as before.

I logged this as a bug with Ubuntu and then installed an Ubuntu Mainline kernel and, whilst it still exhibited the screen corruption, it included a new Drive Encryption Password Prompt which did not suffer from the problem and gave me a functioning system once again (but read on for more).

Trackpad Buttons

I then noticed that the trackpad buttons were not working. Well that’s not entirely true - they were scrolling up and down a page, rather than behaving as normal trackpad buttons. This Ubuntu Question suggested that I was not alone and offered a solution - that of changing the trackpad from synaptic to imps driver. I tried this, but instantly the Trackpad felt less responsive, the cursor slowed down and whatever I tried to customise it made no odds.

But more importantly the Trackpad buttons still didn’t work.

It is worth noting that even without the Trackpad buttons, you can still left-click (single finger tap to Trackpad) and right-click (two finger tap to Trackpad). In reality this is what I shall use in day-to-day operation, so this is issue is not a show stopper - at least for me.

After much head scratching and trial and error I found that by rebooting into the original 3.19.0-25 kernel, holding the Shift key down to access Grub during boot process, not only fixed the Trackpad issue, but it also resolved the screen corruption issues during the boot process.

As a result, I decided to uninstall the newer Kernel 3.19.0-30, which contains the problem, along with the mainline kernel and generic LTS kernel packages. This will prevent any further updates to the Kernel and is clearly only a short-term fix, but the benefit is a perfectly working system.

Review of Reported Ubuntu X1 Carbon Gen 3 Issues

It is possibly worth reviewing that Ubuntu Question again and the issues raised therein:

1. Wi-Fi is disconnecting: I have not encountered this problem at all.
2. Click-buttons are not working at all: Resolved by returning to kernel 3.19.0-25.
3. Vertical Scrolling (with trackpoint and middle button): Not tested as yet.
4. Special Keys (like Brightness): these all work fine for me.
5. Screen Characters scrambled on 14.10: not experienced in 14.04 as yet.
6. Trackpoint Sensitivity: I think that was a by-product of the imps driver - which I have not needed to use.

In short, at least for the 3.19.0-25 kernel, this is a fully functioning Ubuntu laptop!

Fingerprint Recognition

I was expecting problems with Fingerprint recognition, but that was not the case. I simply installed a couple of packages, scanned my fingerprints and it all worked fine.

$ sudo apt-get install fprintd fingerprint-gui

There were two surprises: The first was that the fingerprint reader works for command line use - so no more typing the sudo password - simply swipe your finger! The second surprise was that it doesn’t appear to work for the initial LightDM login. The fingerprint scanner flashes a couple of times and then stops. Given that you only type this once in a session, this isn’t a huge deal, compared to the number of times you enter passwords for sudo and the lock screen.

There are reports of LightDM not working with encrypted home directories, but I am using whole Drive Encryption which I wouldn’t have thought would have been affected in this way, given that I have already entered my drive encryption password by this point.

If I manage to solve this problem I will of course update this page. If you have any solutions please do comment below.

WLAN - 4G Wireless

Lastly, an oddity of the BT Business Direct specification is that this laptop has a 4G WLAN slot. This was not something I particularly wanted, but of course now that I have it I have had to order a £6.25 per month Vodafone 4G Data Plan. Once the SIM card arrives I will provide feedback.

Conclusion

It is easy to be critical of some of the pitfalls in running Ubuntu on the X1 Carbon, but the reality, with a few caveats, is that it works flawlessly. The laptop is a joy to use, the keyboard feels wonderful and running your fingers across the trackpad is an almost sensuous experience - I may be getting carried away here, but suffice to say that this is a very good laptop and it is working beautifully on Ubuntu with the kernel 3.19.0-25.

With luck the bugs will be resolved and I will be able to update the kernel in due course!

I received a surprising amount of interest in my Novatech n1410 review and my subsequent nine-months on review.

Over the past 32 months I have continued to be fairly happy with my Novatech n1410. It has generally been fast enough, reliable enough, light enough and with a decent battery life. The downsides over the long term proved to be the keyboard and trackpad which have never been enjoyable to use and the lack of audio volume. Overall though I would say that it has lived up to my expectations for a budget Ultrabook.

But then last night - disaster struck, I was closing my laptop after working and the case opened up at the right hand hinge. This is not a heavily-abused laptop - it has never been dropped, I don’t commute, the laptop is stored in a padded case and treated at all times with respect. So why would the case fail in this way?

On closer inspection this would appear to be a natural failure point, the case after all is only plastic held together by a single screw at that point and the pressures on that hinge are immense. Indeed I am very surprised that it did not fail sooner. I think I probably contributed by being right-handed and probably putting a greater strain typically on the right hand hinge.

On the one hand, after 32 months I can’t really complain - it has certainly justified its cost. But I do feel a bit aggrieved that such a lightly used laptop should have failed within 3 years.

I can hear many of you thinking that 3 years is a long time for a laptop, but to put it in context my last laptop, a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300-1GO, was bought in 2008 and is still in daily use after 7 years.

I also feel embarrassed, I was encouraged to buy a ThinkPad, but the cost deterred me. Realistically a ThinkPad would probably have carried on working for at least another 2-3 years, and if you divide the cost by the life expectancy then perhaps the Novatech was a false economy. Well let’s face facts - it was a false economy. And I wouldn’t have had to be put up with a grotty keyboard for the past 32 months!

At the moment the Novatech is still working and I can close it just about - by the insertion of a ruler between the screen and the keyboard, and putting my weight on that as I lower the screen. I will live with it for the time being, but will start giving some thought as to my next laptop.

Possibly even a ThinkPad!

At work I needed a cheap laptop for a computer-illiterate user. Giving them Windows, would have meant that they would have had to keep up-to-date with Windows Updates, with all the potential issues that would cause, along with the need for malware protection. It would also have pushed up the cost, a laptop capable of pushing Windows along reasonably decently, would have cost a few hundred pounds at least.

Generally I would just have purchased a low-end Lenovo laptop and installed Ubuntu onto it, but I was aware that Ebuyer had recently launched an HP255 G1 Laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed for £219.99 inc. vat (just £183 if you can reclaim the VAT).

Buying pre-installed with Ubuntu afforded me the comfort of knowing that everything would work. Whilst Ubuntu generally does install very easily, there are sometimes hassles in getting some of the function buttons working, for brightness, volume etc. Knowing that these issues would all be sorted, along with saving me the time in having to install Ubuntu, seemed an attractive proposition.

Unboxing

My first impressions were good, the laptop comes with a laptop case and the laptop itself looks smart enough for a budget machine. An Ubuntu sticker, instead of the usual Windows sticker, was welcome, although the two sticky marks where previous stickers had been removed were less so. Still, at least they had been removed.

Whilst we are on the subject of Windows’ remnants - the Getting Started leaflet was for Windows 8 rather than Ubuntu. Most Ubuntu users won’t care, but this is a poor attention to detail and, if this laptop is to appeal to the mass market, then it may cause confusion.

First Boot

Booting up the laptop for the first time gave me an “Essential First Boot Set-up is being performed. Please wait.” message. I did wait and for quite a considerable time - probably a not dissimilar time to installing Ubuntu from scratch; I couldn’t help but suspect that was precisely what was happening. Eventually I was presented with a EULA from HP, which I had no choice but to accept or choose to re-install from scratch. Finally I was presented with an Ubuntu introduction, which I confess I skipped; suffice to say the new user was welcomed to Ubuntu with spinny things.

The first thing to note is that this is Ubuntu 12.04, the previous LTS (Long Term Support release). This will be supported until 2017, but it is a shame that it didn’t have the latest LTS release - Ubuntu 14.04. Users may of course choose to upgrade.

Secondly, the wireless was slow to detect the wireless access points on the network. Eventually I decided to restart network-manager, but just as I was about to do so, it suddenly sprang into life and displayed all the local access points. Once connected, it will re-connect quickly enough, but it does seem to take a while to scan new networks. Or perhaps I am just too impatient.

Ubuntu then prompted to run some updates, but the updates failed, as “91.189.88.153” was said to be unreachable, even though it was ping-able. The address is owned by Canonical, but whether this was a momentary server error, or some misconfiguration on the laptop, I have no idea.

This would have been a major stumbling block for a new Ubuntu user. Running apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade worked fine, typing Ctrl+Alt+t to bring up the terminal and then typing:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I notice that this referenced an HP-specific repository doubtless equipped with hardware specific packages:

http://oem.archive.canonical.com/updates/ precise-oem.sp1 public
http://hp.archive.canonical.com/updates precise-stella-anaheim public

I assume that adding this latter repository would be a good idea if purchasing a Windows version of this laptop and installing Ubuntu.

Hardware

This is a typical chunky laptop.  But, if you were expecting a sleek Air-like laptop for £220, then you need to take a reality shower. What it is, is a good-looking, well-made, traditional laptop from a quality manufacturer. At this price, that really should be enough.

Ubuntu “System Details” reveals that this is running an “AMD E1-1500 APU with Radeon HD Graphics x 2”, running 64-bit with a 724GB drive and 3.5GiB RAM. That would appear to be a lower spec processor than is typically available on-line for an HP 255 G1 running Windows; which generally seem to have 1.75Ghz processors (albeit at twice the price).

The great news was that, as expected, all the buttons worked. So what? Well, it may seem like a trivial matter whether, for example, pressing Fn10 increases the volume or not, but I think many of us have the experience of spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get such things to work properly. And buttons that don’t work, continue to irritate until the day you say goodbye to that machine. The fact that everything works as it should is enormously important and is the primary reason why buying Ubuntu pre-installed is such a big deal.

The keyboard and trackpad seem perfectly good enough to me, certainly much better than on my Novatech ultrabook; although not everyone seems to like them. In particular, it is good to have a light on the caps lock key.

I have not tested battery life, but, as this is usually the first thing to suffer in an entry-level machine, I would not hope for much beyond a couple of hours.

For other details on hardware, please refer to the product information and read more reviews here.

Performance

Booting up takes around 45 seconds and a further 20 seconds to reach the desktop. That is quite a long time these days for Ubuntu, but fast enough I would imagine for most users and considerably faster than it takes Windows to reach a usable state, at least in my experience.

Being that bit slower to boot, Suspend becomes more important: Closing the lid suspended the laptop and opening it again brought up the lock screen password prompt almost immediately. Repeated use showed this to work reliably.

As to system performance, well frankly this is not a fast laptop. Click on Chromium, post boot, and it takes about 9 seconds to load; LibreOffice takes about 6 seconds to load. Even loading System Settings takes a second or two. Once you’ve run them once, after each boot, they will load again in less than half the time. Despite the slow performance, it is always perfectly usable, and is absolutely fine for email and web-browsing applications.

The other thing to remember is that this will be the performance you should be able to expect throughout its life - i.e. it will not slow down even more as it gets older. Windows users typically expect their computers to slow down over time, largely because of the different way in which system and application settings are stored in Windows. Ubuntu does not suffer from this problem, meaning that a 5-year-old Ubuntu installation should be working as fast as it did when it was first installed.

Conclusions

I struggle to think of what else you could buy that provides a full desktop experience for £220. And it isn’t even some cheap unbranded laptop from the developing world. Sure, it isn’t the fastest laptop around, but it is perfectly fast enough for web, email and office documents. And the fact that you can expect it to continue working, with few, if any, worries about viruses, makes it ideal for many users. It certainly deserves to be a success for HP, Ubuntu and Ebuyer.

But, whilst this low-price, low-power combination was ideal for me on this occasion, it is a shame that there are no other choices available pre-installed with Ubuntu. I wonder how many newcomers to Ubuntu will come with the belief that Ubuntu is slow, when in reality it is the low-end hardware that is to blame?

Please HP, Ubuntu and Ebuyer - give us more choice.

And Lenovo, please take note - you just lost a sale.

For more reviews please visit Reevo.

The power switch remains a momentary petty irritation, but the poor quality keyboard and intrusive trackpad are harder to live with. The wireless is pretty poor, but it generally connects fine and rarely actually causes me any problems.

But the Novatech n1410 remains a good-looking, lightweight laptop with a great battery life, and highly portable. And it was undeniably great value.

One new irritation, that I hadn’t noticed in my earlier review, is that the volume can be too quiet in some circumstances. If sound is important to you, and particularly if you require it to deliver the goods in noisy environments, then you will probably need to invest in some external speakers, for example a pair of XMI X-Mini MAX V1-1 Capsule Speakers.

Nine months on, and I decided to upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 to 13.04 and 13.10. The upgrades both went flawlessly and as usual I do wonder why Ubuntu users seem so tied to re-installing instead of upgrading.

But unfortunately it hasn’t been all good news - the upgrade to 13.04 saw the introduction of two bugs:

Brightness on Boot: On booting up, brightness is set to the maximum every time. The numerous suggested fixes didn’t seem to work and so, pending a better solution, I have installed “xbacklight” and added it to the start-up applications with the switches “-set 20” to set it to 20% brightness. And yes, I am aware that I could have just echoed the chosen brightness to the relevant device file:

# echo 1102 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

Volume FN Buttons: The volume buttons no longer work correctly, on the first press the volume shoots up to maximum or minimum and then the indicator keeps flashing, locking the keyboard and requiring a REISUB reboot. For the time being I have simply re-mapped the F10, F11 and F12 buttons to do the tasks that would normally be done by FN F10, FN F11 and FN F12 (see screenshot).

But I cannot fairly blame Novatech for these bugs, what I need to do is report bugs for them with Ubuntu. I have found an article about Backlight Debugging and another on Hotkey Debugging, both of which I will be following at some point.

After spending much time trying to choose the perfect Ultrabook, I came to the conclusion that it is either not made, or is prohibitively expensive. In the meantime I ordered a Novatech nFinity n1410 (14” Intel Core i5 3317 Mobile Processor - 8GB DDR3 Memory) for just £450 (plus VAT).

My expectations were fairly low, given the price, but I expected something that would be adequate and I was pleased to be able to buy a laptop without a Microsoft operating system pre-installed.

Purchase and delivery were quick and painless, thanks to Novatech.

My first impressions were very agreeable, it looked much better than expected with a metal top. The dimensions were just as I had expected - it would fit in my briefcase and be light and portable, but still have a decent sized screen.

Then I went to switch the n1410 on, oh dear, the power switch is terrible! Cheap, nasty, with a horrible unsatisfactory movement. It still irritates me every time I use it. It glows blue when powered and red with disk activity. Once I went to put the laptop in my briefcase and the flashing blue button reminded me that it was still in standby - so yes the button is clearly functional - but still I hate it.

Installing Ubuntu 12.10 was very simple, with no issues whatsoever. With Ubuntu installed and working well, it was time to reboot. I made the mistake of glancing away from the screen for few seconds, and it was already sitting at the login prompt. It boots in less than 15s, it takes longer to shutdown, but this is a great benefit for a portable laptop.

Logging in and things just got better - the buttons all work, including the FN buttons like brightness and media playback. This is seriously impressive and the Ubuntu community deserve congratulations, as this is no mean feat. Given how painless the installation is, you can’t but wonder why Novatech don’t offer Ubuntu as an option.

This all seemed to good to be true, and it was, suddenly the wireless signal dropped out, despite my sitting less than a metre away from the wireless access point. And this kept happening. Googling for an answer I ended up adding the following line to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:

options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 bt_coex_active=N

This seemed to make the laptop usable, but it is not a long-term solution. I was advised to try a newer kernel, and I am now on 3.6.3, but it seems no different. The problem seems to be a bug with the iwlwifi module,  and it does seem to be known about, so hopefully a fix will wander down to Ubuntu soon. Maybe upgrading to 13.04 will fix all, but that is one for another day.

I tried closing the laptop, whilst still on, and it promptly went into standby mode. I opened the lid again and the laptop sprung back into life, although the wireless was not connected. Restarting network-manager revived the wireless connection. I can live with that. In fact I do find that I frequently need to restart network manager when first powering up, which may well be more evidence of the flaws in iwlwifi.

The screen is glossy, which is never a good thing, but other than that I cannot fault it. The speakers are a little tinny, but I suspect that that is par for the course with an Ultrabook. The keyboard feels a bit cheap and I keep missing letters, or getting letters twice. I hope I get used to this, but it has to be said that the keyboard is not a pleasure to use.

I am also struggling with the trackpad. My previous laptops have had smaller trackpads, which I would occasionally catch when typing. This laptop has a large trackpad, which I am constantly catching, and it is driving me slightly mad. I am not sure that this is the fault of Novatech though, in theory Ubuntu should disable the trackpad when typing, but in my experience it could work better. Maybe I can improve this is some way and I will do further research.

Another trackpad irritation is that the right hand side of the pad seems to be the right-mouse-click, and the left hand side - the left mouse click. Whilst flawlessly logical, it means that right handed users have to travel a long way for left click. I suspect that this is a trait of new Xorg versions, but I have done no research on the matter. Maybe I will get used to it.

The trackpad does have buttons below it, but they are simply horrible to use, requiring a considerable pressure to work, for that reason I tend to only use the trackpad itself.

Sticking with the default 128gb SSD was a mistake though, as I could not even transfer my Pictures folder (blame my young family and camera touting wife!). I knew that popey had added an mSATA drive to his Lenovo X220, and I telephoned Novatech to find out if this would be possible with the n1410. The answer was that yes it had an mSATA port, but that it was limited to 32gb and would only be used to improve the boot speed. I was not convinced that they were correct and Googling the subject showed that Dell had said the same about their laptops, and it was not true. With some concern I ordered a Crucial CT256M4SSD3 256GB m4 mSATA 6Gb/s Internal SSD. To cut a long story short- this proved successful and I intend writing up the experience in a separate post.

Battery life seems excellent - with past laptops I have generally used them connected to the mains, but the battery life on the n1410 is good enough that I am finding myself using it more like a tablet, in leaving it on most of the time. I believe 5 hours should be possible.

Overall this is a very good value Ultrabook. Clearly it is not perfect, but I never expected it to be, I expected it to be adequate and functional, and that it certainly is. That it is also attractive, with a reasonable screen, battery life and all working with Ubuntu is just fantastic. All in all I am very pleased with my new Ultrabook.

The battery on my ageing Dell Inspiron 8200 had to be replaced recently, then the charger, and then (perhaps damage from cheap charger/battery?) the laptop died completely with amperage warnings about a month later.

So I researched a replacement laptop, and ordered a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, with 3gb RAM and 250gb hard drive. I ordered with downgrade media to XP Pro. Yes, anyone who has read my previous postings will appreciate just how appallingly hypocritical that is; but given that I will need XP to run under VirtualBox, and given that you don’t seem to save any money by not having it, it made sense (even if it irks to be constantly adding to MS profits).

Tempted though I was to install Kubuntu 8.10 (my old laptop ran 8.04), I decided that the sensible thing to do (given KDE version) was to install Debian Lenny. Obviously I had chosen a laptop which should be readily Linux compatible, so I did expect an easy time, and so it proved. I decided to install the 64-bit version.

The installer picked up our DHCP server without a fuss, and prompted me to insert the non-free driver for the Intel wireless into a USB stick, which I did and it picked up without a fuss. I asked the guided partitioner to give me a separate home, but apart from those two interactions, I just accepted the default for everything else.

I booted into Debian, and noticed that they have prettied kdm in the past few weeks, and even given kwin a new default wallpaper. OpenOffice 2.4 and Iceweasel were already installed, so there really wasn’t much else to do.

The good news is that, thus far at least, all the packages that I have wanted have been available (remember this is 64-bit). As far as I know (I’m new to 64-bit) I have a pure 64-bit system. It all seems very snappy, apart from OpenOffice, which takes a second or two to load.

The astonishing thing, and something that I have never seen mentioned in any Linux vs Windows review, is how quick it is to go from zero to actually having a fully productive machine. Probably close to one hour.

There is one negative, which is that for some reason Debian Lenny 32-bit and 64-bit have a mismatch in versions between virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules. Such problems are only to be expected (Lenny hasn’t been officially released yet) and I have checked that there is a bug report logged. To fix the problem in the meantime:

$ sudo aptitude remove virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.26-1-amd64
$ sudo rmmod vboxdrv
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential module-assistant
$ sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose-source
$ sudo module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose
$ sudo dpkg -l virtualbox*  (check all are at same version)
$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv