Is the new Lenovo Thinkpad X1 carbon gen 9 going to be supported by Fedora?

Discussions in English on installing or upgrading Fedora
#1

Hello all!

New here, registered a FAS account today to be able to register a bug on Bugzilla and thought I use that also to ask something on my mind since a while.

I got my eyes on the new X1 carbon gen 9 (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x1/X1-Carbon-G9/p/22TP2X1X1C9) because I prefer 16:10 format, but couldn’t figure out if Fedora will be an option or not. A call to their hotline answered the question: it seems it will be available with fedora pre-installed from about the end of February. Great news!

I still wanted to ask here if all the new bells & whistles (human presence detection, 5G WWAN, fingerprint reader integrated in power-up button, …) are going to work out-of-the-box?

Could you already test or do you have informations on that?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Best regards.

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#2

There will definitely be new Lenovo models running Fedora. Let me check with them about what exactly we can say about specific models at this point. I don’t mean to be coy, but I think we don’t want to repeat the situation that happened last time where we announced pretty early and then covid-times logistics caught up to the ideal plans and everything slipped.

I’ll also ask about the specific hardware. I think the problem with WWAN was dealing with regulatory issues so that might still be tied up. I don’t know about the others, but I (personally, let alone officially) would be surprised and disappointed if the fingerprint reader stops working altogether, but I don’t know about fancy things like simultaneous power up and log in. Likewise no idea about presence detection.

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#3

Hi,

I think I’m allowed to confirm Fedora will be coming with the X1 Carbon 9 - I hope so! We’re currently in test and energy cert with the updated F33 image the community kindly created for us recently.
I can’t commit to a date when it will be available, but we learnt a lot from our experience last year and it should go more smoothly this year. I’m hoping it won’t be very long before it’s available and online in the US and Canada.

We are still having some teething issues with getting systems up worldwide but there is light at the end of the tunnel there. I’m not making any prediction because it turns out I’m terrible at them - but it’s being very actively worked on and there are a lot of people in Lenovo pushing to make it happen.

Fingerprint reader works (I think I’d be in trouble if it didn’t!).
WWAN is not available in the initial release but is being worked on. WWAN has been a bugger challenge than I expected (we are working on it for the X1C8 too and will have news there too in the not too distant future). We’ve got a lot of hurdles cleared but there are still a couple of pieces that fall in place. Fortunately the regulatory issues are looking good so now it’s mostly down to the last implementation issues and how to get the various pieces into users hands.
HPD (Human Presence Detection) is not supported on Linux I’m afraid - it’s an interesting feature but not available for Linux yet.

Hope that helps. Let me know if I missed anything
Mark

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#4

@mattdm @mpearson Thanks a lot for your answers! It’s really cool to get first hand information on upcoming products!

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#5

@mpearson concerning WWAN, what’s the best plan: Buying with it already and hope for Software support in the future or buy only WWAN-Ready and wait to add the right WWAN-Module once it’s working?

#6

Once our Linux offering is online I believe it will be only WWAN-Ready as we don’t have WWAN support yet.

I can’t give any guidance on dates - and I was horribly wrong with the estimate for the L860 modem support on the X1C8.As an aside, my colleagues are testing that one internally so it is progressing but getting it completed and actually released publicly is a lot more challenging than expected.

I’d recommend waiting until we confirm support officially - then you can guarantee you get the right modem.

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#7

@mpearson, anything you’re allowed to comment on X1 Yoga Gen 6?
Of course I’m expecting it to work flawlessly due to a sheer similarity with X1C9, but having an official confirmation and windows-free option at checkout would be quite awesome.

For reasons I fail to comprehend, most of the vendors believe that Linux users aren’t interested in 2-in-1s and limit Linux offerings to clamshells :confused:

Out of curiosity, is it an upstream libfprint support or a binary driver?

#8

Hi Aleksei,

I get told off for sharing too much so I’m going to hold my tongue on the Yoga…but I think it would be weird not to have Linux support as we’ve done the previous generations and our Linux program is growing.

Fingerprint reader - some libfprint updates were required for it (which are already in Fedora), but the processing is done in firmware (with LVFS support)…not sure if that answers your question? There’s nothing outside of Fedora needed to make it work if that helps.

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#9

Oh, sorry, I guess I missed that Ubuntu option while checking Yoga Gen 5. My bad.

On the fingerprint reader – yes, that answers my question. I was afraid of libfprint-tod with binary driver library and it’s good to know that there’s a better solution.
Thanks a lot for the existence of your Linux program! :slight_smile:

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#10

This is very exciting! I will have to wait quite a while for the Australia release as we get everything last down under but it will be worth the wait.