Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've installed ubuntu on the x1 carbon this weekend after hacker news recommendations about thinkpads for linux. UK model with US-English keyboard, i5 processor. Seems to be flawless with ubuntu. All drivers worked out of the box. Wireless, audio, suspend, wake up, volume keys on keyboard, battery warning. I've been able to use 'CompizConfig Settings Manager' to hack unity to be the way I want. I found a way to disable the low trackpad.

It's fast, light, beautiful keyboard. I'm really happy with it. I googled for discount vouchers when I ordered and got 10% off.

I'd recommend against buying it for Windows use. I tried it for a couple of days just to see what it was like. It comes preloaded with lots of rubbish (including aggressive Norton popups) and no install media. Awful. The base installation took up half of the 128GB hard disk, which seemed crazy. I uninstalled as much junk as I could, and it worked OK for a bit but later my VPN client stopped working.

If you can get an ISO image of Windows maybe you could install windows in virtual box.

> I'd recommend against buying it for Windows use. I tried it for a couple of days just to see what it was like. It comes preloaded with lots of rubbish (including aggressive Norton popups) and no install media. Awful. The base installation took up half of the 128GB hard disk, which seemed crazy. I uninstalled as much junk as I could, and it worked OK for a bit but later my VPN client stopped working.

I think that any hackers who are going to use a Windows laptop should be familiar and OK with doing a clean install. Nowadays, it's an extremely easy process. You can get an ISO via direct download straight from Microsoft's servers[0] (the one you want is probably "English x64: X17-59465.iso"). You would be surprised how nice a clean Windows 7 install is.

You may also want the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool[1], which will let you install Windows from a USB drive.

I'm pretty sure you can use the OEM key to register the clean Windows install, but I've always just used the Windows 7 Loader[2]. It's fast and easy, and always works.

0: http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-fro...

1: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help...

2: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24901-Windows-Loade...

Great description, thanks.

Can I ask if you can plug in 2 external displays to your X1 on Ubuntu? (my latest Thinkpad did not allow that and I had to switch to something else because it's kind of a show-stopper for me.)

(I didn't order the dongle for this, and don't know. Hopefully someone else does.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com