delta (ThinkPad X280)

Bought on ebay. My first proper ultrabook. This was a nicely specced model, with a good period left on the warranty. I also picked up a nice 1TB portable SSD from the same seller.

Right control key rubber dome seemed upside down. Always clicked on key return. I brought it in to Micro Center to have it serviced under Lenovo's warranty, and they replaced the Keyboard.

At some point I had issue with getting a non-bootable Debian install. For some reason my initramfs lacked the cryptsetup stuff. Here were my notes on fixing it.

1. Boot Debian Live. Install some stuff, decrypt the disk:

sudo apt install cryptsetup lvm2
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p5 nvme0n1p5_crypt
vgscan
vgchange -ay

1. Mount your partitions somewhere. chroot into the root directory. Edit cryptsetup initramfs hooks:

CRYPTSETUP=y

1. Update initramfs (-d delete existing, may be necessary instead of -u)

update-initramfs -u

1. Check your initramfs:

lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-5.x.x-1-amd64 |grep cryptsetup

1. Note during this fix my dual boot windows system wasn't found. You'll have to run update-grub again once the system boots normally.
2. Grub install might fail. My fstab was missing /boot for some reason. Needed to manually add the fstab line. Use the filesystem's UUID (dev/disk/by-uuid…).
3. Unmount /boot/efi
4. Save anything you want in /boot and delete those files (they would be shadowed by the filesystem mounted there otherwise and that might be confusing later).
5. Mount /boot and /boot/efi
6. Either reinstall the kernel packages or copy the files you saved from before back into /boot to ensure correct stuff.
7. Update and install grub

update-grub
grub-install /dev/nvme0n1

I ran into trouble with some Realtek 2.5GbE adapters that wouldn't work on Linux. The issue turned out to be bad power management or USB autosuspend setting. Not really about this machine (delta), but I wanted to make a note of it here since it is one of the few machines I will ever actually need 2.5Gbit speeds.

The solution I found was to disable autosuspend using tlp. I followed this advice on an askubuntu thread.

I put in a Intel AX210 Wifi 6E card. Windows was a pain and made me get another network adapter to download the driver. Linux just worked. No BIOS whitelist to deal with.

I don't have Wifi 6 access points yet, but it works just as well as the 8265NGW it replaced.