Lenovo ThinkPad T480s

This article covers the installation and configuration of Arch Linux on a Lenovo T480s laptop. For the most part things work out-of-the-box, but some features may need to be configured manually.

For a general overview of laptop-related articles and recommendations, see Laptop.

Powersaving

Without special configuration and with default firmware settings, power usage is a bit high (around 7,5W in idle). There are a few knobs to improve battery life:

• Set "Thunderbolt BIOS Assist Mode" to "Enabled" in the EFI firmware interface. This seems to reduce number of idle wakeups.
  • However, kernel versions since 4.19+ should support it natively (), and some power consumption improvements is reported if this is switched to "Disabled" .
• Disable unused peripherals under "Security" -> "I/O port access" in the firmware. This especially applies to the SD/MMC-cardreader, which seems to drain some power even when idle

As of Kernel 4.15, DisplayPort PSR (Panel self refresh) is disabled by default and broken when forcibly enabled (system hangs after a few seconds, display lag). 4.17-rc1 seems to improve a lot in this regard, but PSR still sometimes causes the screen to freeze for a few seconds.

# echo 2-3 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

# echo 2-3 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/bind

Fingerprint reader

The fingerprint sensor is not supported by libfprint.

There is a project python-validity based on open-fprintd, see .

Install python-validity^AUR or python-validity-git^AUR and enroll your fingerprint:

$ fprintd-enroll

Refer to Fprint#Configuration for configuration.

You may experience an issue where the fingerprint reader does not work after the laptop wakes up from suspension. To fix this, try enabling the open-fprintd-resume and open-fprintd-suspend systemd services . If the issue is still present, create a unit file as follows, then enable it .

/etc/systemd/system/fingerprint-restart.service

[Unit]
Description=Restart services to fix fingerprint integration
After=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=systemctl restart open-fprintd.service python3-validity.service

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target

If this solves the issue, you may disable open-fprintd-resume and open-fprintd-suspend again.

PrivacyGuard

The PrivacyGuard feature is referred to as LCD Shadow and was introduced in Linux 5.4.

To enable or turn on the LCD shadow:

# echo 1 > /proc/acpi/ibm/lcdshadow

Conversely, use 0 to disable it:

# echo 0 > /proc/acpi/ibm/lcdshadow

$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/lcdshadow

status:         not supported

Function keys

1. The key is visible to xev and similar tools.
2. The physical key has a symbol on it, which describes its function.
3. This key has a keyboard symbol on it. According to Lenovo, it should open the keyboard settings page , which it does on Windows 10. It does generate an event on Wayland, but not on X.

Troubleshooting

See also

• T480s install video playlist