The biggest motivation for selecting this ThinkPad was strong community support for my X41t. The X41t had a tremendous following but it appears the 11e is not as fortunate.
Fedora 24 provided wonderful hardware support for that ThinkPad x41t and also the later x230t. This changed after Fedora 24. What changed, most notably is, when issuing a shut down to the system, it will nearly complete the power off sequence, but instead shutting down provokes a beep code suggesting bad memory. Second, the touchpad doesn't work.
My short term work around is to leverage the Fedora 24 kernel since with that kernel, the touchpad and shutdown will work. In my experience, the release 24 kernel works with Fedora 26, 27, and 28. The long term solution will be to see if anything changed in the kernel source or kernel configuration.
The odds are good that if you have used dnf to system-upgrade, you no longer have the version 24 kernels. My system-upgrades have always done a good job of cleaning up old kernels. As of writing this, I extracted the 4.5.5-300 kernel from the installer ISO and rebuilt the initramfs. As of finishing this write-up, I located an archive mirror fedora-updates for release 24 providing me with 4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64 and put together the steps.
Overview of the steps
- locate the Fedora 24 kernel and the kernel modules.
- install the RPMs or extract them (an exercise left for the reader)
- run grub2-mkconfig
The steps
# Get the RPMs
wget https://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/k/kernel-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
wget https://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/k/kernel-core-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
wget https://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/k/kernel-modules-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
wget https://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/k/kernel-modules-extra-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
# Probably should use dnf localinstall syntax instead...too late.
rpm -ivh --force kernel-core-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh --force kernel-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh --force kernel-modules-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh --force kernel-modules-extra-4.11.12-100.fc24.x86_64.rpm
# EFI is well supported on this ThinkPad
# Best to uncomment the next line.
# cp /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg-backup
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
reboot
# and see if it works for you!
# But if you need to regenerate the initramfs manually, this is what I used with the 4.5.5 kernel.
dracut -fv /boot/initramfs-4.5.5-300.fc24.x86_64.img 4.5.5-300.fc24.x86_64
reboot and test
The data
# And this is the list of mirrors, from which I used the first two to successfully obtain all four RPMs.
# repo = updates-released-f24 arch = x86_64 country = US https://mirrors.rit.edu/fedora/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/ http://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/fedora-archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/ https://pubmirror2.math.uh.edu/fedora-buffet/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/ http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora-buffet/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/ https://pubmirror1.math.uh.edu/fedora-buffet/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/ https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/updates/24/x86_64/
About the ThinkPad Yoga 11e (Gen 3)
It is a very durable design. The keyboard is great but is absent the Application menu key. The battery life could be better but the underclocking ability of the N2940 can help extend the battery considerably, even if a bit pokey. For me, the touchpad is miserable. I am a person who drags his palm in close proximity to the touchpad, requiring a lot more undos. To edit settings in NetworkManager, I need the right-click or Application menu function. The touchscreen is not a Wacom edition with a two-finger tap, but the X230t Wacom touchscreen supports two-finger tap. I realize alternatively, I could shell out and type nm-connection-editor but Windows XP tablet edition conditioned me differently. Instead tap the icon, right-click the touchpad, right-click touchpad. Then I disable the touchpad until needed next. I have customized my Fedora installation so my desired startup settings, including the enablement of the touchpad, persist. I used to the same customization to keep my XFCE profile clean, which trickles down to a fresh clean browser history and bookmarks every time.
Questions and feedback?
Reach me on Twitter @michaela2kelsey
