Lenovo ThinkPad T460s

Device Status
Intel graphics Yes
Wireless Yes
ALSA no beep
TrackPoint Yes
Touchpad Yes
Webcam Yes
Fingerprint Sensor No
Mobile Broadband Yes
Bluetooth Yes

This article covers the installation and configuration of Arch Linux on a Lenovo T460s laptop.

For a general overview of laptop-related articles and recommendations, see Laptop.

Configuration

The linux-t460sAUR package includes kernel patches that fix the mouse and suspend issues described below, which can be useful until linux includes these patches. Alternatively, linux-gitAUR can be used.

Touchpad/TrackPoint

With kernels older than 4.5.1, there is a kernel bug which causes the physical mouse button (belonging to the TrackPoint) to report release events immediately even when pressing and holding the button. This prevents drag and drop and similar actions from working. This bug was fixed in linux-4.5.1.

Suspend / Resume

With kernels older than 4.6, suspending the T460s by closing the lid when running on battery causes the machine to freeze up entirely. This can be worked around by setting the "intel_pstate=no_hwp" kernel parameter or by compiling the kernel with the patch attached to the kernel bug tracking this issue.

Hibernate / Resume

A long standing kernel bug caused resume from hibernation to fail with a probability that depended on the amount of allocated RAM. This bug is fixed by this patch, and is included in the linux-t460sAUR package.

Fingerprint Sensor

The fingerprint sensor built into the T460s is currently not supported by Fprint.

ALSA Beep

There is no "beep" input to the snd_hda_intel device, so beeps generated by terminal emulators etc. are not played. As a workaround, PulseAudio can be configured to pick up X11 bell events, see PulseAudio#X11 Bell Events.

Function keys

Fn+Esc to enable FnLk which will make your function keys work.

Video Issues

With newer kernels (>= 4.5), there seems to be video flickering, i.e. the screen occasionally goes black for what seems to be a single frame. See bug reports: [1] [2].

This can be worked around by using the i915.enable_rc6=0 kernel parameter [3] (cf. Intel graphics#Skylake support)

See also