Experiment with Beta 4 on Thinkpad X1 Carbon

[linuxnovice]

Hi,

Just thought I'd post my experience with trying out the Beta 4 installer on an X1 Carbon (i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD). I've never used Mageia before and this experiment is to find a suitable replacement for an old Mandriva PC.

Despite downloading a suspect ISO ( see viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4690 ) nearly everything seemed to work fine. In fact post-install, Mageia picked up my network connection, which feeds into the laptop via an ethernet->USB adaptor. I think I just connected it, went through the control center steps and then it was alive within about 1 second! I don't think a Linux distro has done it that easily for me before, but haven't done that many installs either...

A slight issue I had was getting the machine to boot/install from the DVD player, not a fault of the Mageia ISO. As expected, I had to change the boot sequence in the BIOS > Startup > Boot menu and then demote the Windows Boot Manager and promote the USB CD entry to top spot. From my very limited experience with Linux installs that would be end of story for installation on a PC. Not so for this laptop...

The other BIOS options I had to change were: Startup > UEFI/Legacy Boot > Legacy Only (and the "Both" option worked for initial install); Security > Secure Boot > Disabled. It sounds terrible disabling the latter option, but the description talks about preventing "unauthorized operating systems running at boot time". I guess the manufacturers consider the Mageia install to be malware... I think that was all I had to tinker with. Apart from changing the boot order back after the install and using some "Quick" boot option vs Diagnostics mode to speed things up a bit.

After that, all seems well. The actual cold startup time for Magiea into KDE on this machine is about 20 seconds (with only a 1 second planned delay before booting an image). So a bit slower than what people have reported here a while back for these machines.

If anyone else has experiences with Mageia 3 on these machines, I'd be interested to hear about it. For me, so far, so good.

Ben