Saturday, April 2, 2016

Debian with XFCE4 on Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga14

I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga14 because I wanted a new device with handwriting input for writing and drawing; i know that it would work with Ubuntu and assumed that it would also work with a regular Debian installation (I dislike Canonical's approach to force users to their views).

Installation of Debian was somewhat more difficult; here the short description what worked for me in the end.

1. I observed that my working installation of Ubuntu used libwacom-bin, which is only in Debian stretch; thus I decided to install stretch (aka testing). Installations of jessie were not supporting the pointer.

2. To install Debian stretch (alpha 5 release) requires the non-free firmware and additionally the driver for the Intel Wireless 7265 rev 61 (aka 7265D), which is iwlwifi--7260-17.ucode (download from a git...), which i put on a second usb stick (on the first i had the inofficial stretch release including the firmware).

3. Install regularly and add the USB stick with the firmware when requested.

 4. Restart and produce /etc/apt/sources.list (not automatic in alpha 5)

deb http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free 
deb http://security.debian.org/debian stretch/updates main contrib non-free 

and /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo 
iface lo inet loopback 

auto wlp2s0 
iface wlp2s0 inet dhcp 
     wpa-ssid xxxx 
     wpa-psk "pppppp"

 5. restart and login as root; check that network is ok.

Then apt-get update, apt-get upgrade (some problem with iwlwifi?? - it needed a apt-get upgrade -f). install xfce4, xfce4-goodies, xournal (for drawing) startx to test install lightdm

it works, when you restart, the regular xfce login greeter is there!