Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch

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Reason: Do not use first-person narration. (Discuss in Talk:Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch)

Installation

To install Arch turn your device completely off (shutdown Windows). Now press the little switch on the left side of the device near the ethernet port. You are now able to enter the BIOS and disable "Secure Boot". After that, save your settings and shutdown the machine once more. After pressing the small button again, you may enter the boot menu and choose your USB installation medium.

You are probably greeted now by complete darkness, press F12 a few times to brighten up your screen.

Graphics

There are at least two graphics options for the U430, Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) and the Nvidia card described below.

Graphics work well out of the box after installing xf86-video-intel. Bumblebee works very well too, if you want to use the integrated NVIDIA card. Be sure to also install bbswitch and primus, without primus I was not able to launch games from Steam.

If you do not want to utilize Optimus, it may be of benefit to disable it in the BIOS, there is thankfully an option for this.

Networking

Works perfectly. At least with my unit I also do not experience connection dropping on Wifi, which seems to be a problem for some.

Track-pad

Works, but the out-of-box experience is not great. Copy and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf until it fits your needs. Here is mine:

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/55-synaptics-u430t.conf

# prevent the settings app from overwriting our settings:
# gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.mouse active false
 
 
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "nathan touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "synaptics"
 
    Option "TapButton1" "1"
    Option "TapButton2" "3"
    Option "TapButton3" "2"

    # accurate tap-to-click!
    Option "FingerLow" "50"
    Option "FingerHigh" "55"
 
    # prevents too many intentional clicks
    Option "PalmDetect" "0"
 
    # vertical and horizontal scrolling, use negative delta values for "natural" scrolling
    Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "VertScrollDelta" "75"
    Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "75"
 
    Option "MinSpeed" "1"
    Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
 
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "2"
    Option "ConstantDeceleration" "4"

    # Disable Soft buttons
    Option "SoftButtonAreas" "0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0"
EndSection

Touchscreen

Works perfectly. Be aware that many applications are not designed with touchscreens in mind and may not work that great. GNOME 3 works very well, though.

Hot-keys

Work perfectly. There is a setting in the BIOS to switch the fn-button, so that the function-keys (F1-F12) work as intended.

Power management

There is a noticeable drop in battery run-time compared to Windows 8, but there are tools to improve from about 3h to almost 6h.

First, if you are using it, make sure Bumblebee and most important bbswitch are properly set up. If not, it may happen that your Nvidia card runs at all times! If that's the case your device will get a lot hotter and louder than in normal operation.

Check if your card is on or off with cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch

For general power management and if you do not want to tweak every setting yourself, install and enable TLP, it worked wonders on my device.

DO NOT install laptop-mode, cpupower, or any other power-management tools in addition to tlp. cpupower may even break p-state (powersaving) of your Haswell CPU, modern CPUs know how to handle themselves.

There are also a lot of tools and services especially for Thinkpads – none of these worked on my Ideapad.