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I'm planing to buy a new laptop in some time. Especially I've been looking into Ultrabooks, the Lenovo U410 looks quite good for its pricing.

How is Ubuntu supported on this ultrabook?

I will have Ubuntu only probably so the problem about dual OS on this laptop should be solved.

Do the sound, battery life, wireless, quick booting + other stuff work like they should on an ultrabook?

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    Battery might be less with Linux. With the X220, it only has Intel chips and they work great with Ubuntu.
    – Martin Ueding
    Nov 18, 2012 at 14:20
  • On Windows they say that the U410 should have max around 7-9 hours of battery power or so if I remember right. But why is it so that the battery drains faster on Linux systems? Is it explained anywhere?
    – Rok
    Nov 18, 2012 at 14:27
  • The problem is that the Linux kernel cannot use all the power saving functions because they are not super stable as of now. On my X220, I only have some 5 to 5.5 hours of battery life. Accordint to Lenovo, I should be getting 9 hours. I have to try some other kernel parameters to save power, but currently, Windows uses less power.
    – Martin Ueding
    Nov 18, 2012 at 15:07
  • Oh ok, thanks for the information about the battery support.
    – Rok
    Nov 18, 2012 at 15:45
  • The power-saving issue also has to deal with the fact that the the default "ondemand" CPU governor is pretty out-dated. Something along the lines of it wakes the CPU up to see if the CPU needs to be woke up -- kind of backwards, but was never really a problem until recently.
    – Chuck R
    Aug 14, 2013 at 8:21

1 Answer 1

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Ubuntu isn't very compatible with lenovo u410 Here's a list of things I did for my u410. Before install - Backup windows 8 for when in need

How to view partitions in Lenovo u410 - press fn+f2 and change boot settings from raid to AHCI - run sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda - run sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sdb

  • install special files in sda and sdb then creat 2-4 gb swap or hdd (better but slower) (note that ssd's deteriorate as sdd is used written)
  • install cryptsetup and create encrypted partition
  • install grub on /dev/sda by installing boot repair
  • sudo add apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot && sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot repair
  • click recommended repair
  • reboot
  • Move Desktop files, Music, Videos, Downloads, Documents and other things (including /tmp) into HDD also known as sdb and create symbolic links to home
  • setup trim reference Activating TRIM section
  • setup normally
  • First check trim by using sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i TRIM
  • activate trim use http://www.webupd8.org/2013/01/enable-trim-on-ssd-solid-state-drives.html
  • add discard, noatime & nodiratime to etc/fstab to increase hard drive speeds and life
  • move tmp to ram from sda
  • http://apcmag.com/how-to-maximise-ssd-performance-with-linux.htm
  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic (read instructions for bumblebee and change launcher scripts)
  • run optirun [progam] (this is to give it graphics acceleration
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    You should not need Boot Repair. My Lenovo worked just fine, I just had to tell the EFI which image to boot (or I may have used efibootmgr, I forget). Boot Repair does some pretty funky stuff, and I wouldn't advise using it unless you know exactly what you're doing.
    – Chuck R
    Aug 14, 2013 at 8:28

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