NetBSD on Lenovo X1 Carbon -- Problems!

ajgraves

Guys, I've been waiting all week for my Lenovo X1 Carbon to arrive. Finally FedEx dropped it off today. First thing I did, is I attempted to upgrade the SSD and realized that the gen2 doesn't support NVMe flash. Bummer. No electronics store in my area has an M.2 SATA SSD. That's ok, I'll go ahead and install NetBSD anyways.

So now I have some issues. I was very much looking forward to NetBSD on this laptop, but I feel a bit disappointed thus far.

First issue, I'm absolutely addicted to two finger scrolling on the touchpad. It's a MUST have for me. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work. I've not been able to find any sysctl or other tuning I can do to make that work.

I also cannot control my brightness. No matter what method I try. The buttons do not work (which I've seen others say online). That's fine, I'll use xbacklight. Except it returns an error "No outputs have backlight property." Hmm, ok. So I try to set hw.acpi.acpiout0.brightness to a value other than 100, but it doesn't work. It doesn't return an error, and the output looks like it actually changes the brightness, but if I check the value immediately afterwards, it's still 100.

xfce also can't read the battery status. I see also many people complain about that online, and it seems as though that's due to xfce attempting to use apm instead of envstat. Ok fine, no big deal, I can check my battery via other means, and as mentioned this is actually an xfce problem rather than a NetBSD problem. I'm trying to think of a hackish way I can make it work, but at the end of the day I may need to sit down and try to come up with a patch to submit upstream to xfce.

I'm running 9.2-stable (dated 9/3). I can update to -head but I'm not super confident it'll do much, but it couldn't hurt I suppose.

Also, there's no screen saver config panel in xfce, strange. I can't seem to find it anywhere.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I can also post necessary output as needed, wasn't sure what to include at this point.

rvp

ajgraves

2-finger scrolling: This works only on some touchpads. Sorry.
screen brightness: if you have an Intel card, you can use the intel_backlight package. And, if your DE/WM allows it, you can trap those X multimedia keys and then run intel_backlight incr/decr appropriately.
XFCE battery stats: I've got a patch that I've been sitting on for weeks now--send me an email (same username C/o the SDF Unix System) and I'll send you a binary to test--sonetime this week.

ajgraves

rvp thanks!

rvp 2-finger scrolling: This works only on some touchpads. Sorry.

That's a bummer. I haven't installed OpenBSD on this machine yet, but it just works on my other Lenovo hardware. I wonder what's different in their setup/driver.

rvp screen brightness: if you have an Intel card, you can use the intel_backlight package. And, if your DE/WM allows it, you can trap those X multimedia keys and then run intel_backlight incr/decr appropriately.

Well hell, I tried looking for that package with the underscore and couldn't find it. I just tried now with a dash instead, and there it was. Huzzah! I can change my brightness now! Now I need to figure out how to get the keys to trigger it (if that's even possible, going to try xfce keyboard shortcuts first, then go from there. Thanks!

rvp XFCE battery stats: I've got a patch that I've been sitting on for weeks now--send me an email (same username C/o the SDF Unix System) and I'll send you a binary to test--sonetime this week.

I will email you. Also, cool to see another SDF user out in the wild! I'm a long-time ARPA member. 😀

pfr

rvp 2-finger scrolling: This works only on some touchpads

Do we know which trackpad's inarticular are supported?

ajgraves I haven't installed OpenBSD on this machine yet, but it just works on my other Lenovo hardware. I wonder what's different in their setup/driver.

I'd be interested to know the conclusion here, ie. is it a different trackpad or does OpenBSD have more driver support for more trackpads?

rvp

ajgraves Now I need to figure out how to get the keys to trigger it

Run xev. The keys should show up as XF86...
Or, run this script:

#!/bin/sh
#
# showkey.sh: de-clutter xev(1) key output.

exec xev -event keyboard | awk '
BEGIN {
	RS = ""
}
/^Key(Press|Release) / {
	l = $0
	sub(/ event.+keysym 0x[[:xdigit:]]+,/, "", l);
	sub(/\), .+$/, "", l)
	print l
}'

ajgraves I will email you.

Got it.

ajgraves I'm a long-time ARPA member.

Same here.

ajgraves

rvp Or, run this script

Thanks! The audio up/down keys are captured, but unfortunately the brightness keys are not. I have a work around though, I did keyboard shortcuts in xfce for Ctrl+Alt+Shift++ and - for brightness up/down. I'll work on audio later but at least I know how to see what keys to attempt to capture there. Curiously, xfce4-mixer appears to be missing from packages.

rvp

ajgraves The audio up/down keys are captured, but unfortunately the brightness keys are not.

Yeah. I thought it was HW-dependent, but that doesn't appear to be the case: the kernel doesn't pass those keys up to userspace on my laptop either.

ajgraves

pfr I'd be interested to know the conclusion here, ie. is it a different trackpad or does OpenBSD have more driver support for more trackpads?

I'm still tinkering with NetBSD on this particular machine. To be fair, the trackpad is very different from that on my other Lenovo systems. If I decided to put OpenBSD on it I'll report back on how it functions there.

rvp

pfr Do we know which trackpad's inarticular are supported?

You're asking a guy who goes out of his way to disable his touchpad ...?

Aside from grovelling through the source and xref'ing against the datasheets, I dunno. Try it and see, I guess. See here. Same manufacturer, but different models: his works, mine doesn't.

nia

pfr sys/dev/pckbport/synaptics.c attempts to scroll based on Synaptics' "finger width detection". It was intended to be the case in NetBSD that scrolling is activated when two fingers are held together on the pad. Synaptics basically broke this feature in their hardware at some point (my hardware's reported figures oscillate horribly). Try lowering sysctl hw.synaptics.finger_scroll-min then holding two fingers together on the pad. It might work for you!

In comparison, sys/dev/pckbport/elantech.c scrolls when two fingers are detected on the pad, regardless of their proximity. This is much easier to do and much cleaner. Briefly, the synaptics driver did this, but I had to revert it because it broke other gestures that are required on trackpads that lack buttons entirely, and I don't have hardware to test those (check the CVS history). I'm happy with arrow keys and trackpoint scrolling, tbh.

Anyway, this is probably also possible to emulate using Xorg's mousedrv(4) - see the EmulateWheel option.

Some reading https://marc.info/?l=netbsd-current-users&m=158450374625332&w=2

pfr

ajgraves That would be ace. I'm tempted to buy myself an X1 Nano and use NetBSD on that, but I also cannot live without trackpad multi finger input. I put up with it on my X230 but If I'm spending a bit of money on a laptop I'd love to know what is going to work and what isn't.

ajgraves

pfr most likely what I’m going to do is buy another SSD for mine. I already did that, but realized that the X1 Carbon I got doesn’t support NVMe 🤣 so I’m going to return the one I bought and get a regular m.2 sata SSD. Once I’ve done that I’ll drop OpenBSD on it.

rvp two-finger scroling is an abomination and against the laws of what's physically possible, just like bumblebees can fly 😉

rvp

nia to emulate using Xorg's mousedrv(4)

There you go: excellent suggestion.
It works!:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/mouse.conf
Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Mouse0"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option      "Device" "/dev/wsmouse"
    Option      "EmulateWheel" "on"
    Option      "EmulateWheelButton" "3"
    Option      "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
$

Right click, then up & down to scroll.

ajgraves

nia Try lowering sysctl hw.synaptics.finger_scroll-min then holding two fingers together on the pad. It might work for you!

Unfortunately that didn’t work, but thank you for the suggestion and the history into the driver!

rvp Right click, then up & down to scroll.

Alright so that seems to get it to work! However because of the right click first, it requires some awkward 3-finger movement on the trackpad that I’ll need to get used to. Any thoughts on accomplishing this without the right click first? Not sure that wouldn’t cause new problems.

pfr

rvp Besides adding /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/mouse.conf Do I need to do anything else?

mccd

rvp Hey, sorry for bumping a very old thread.

I just gave this a spin on my computer, and adding the file with that exact setup (except changing emulatewheelbutton to 2) does nothing on my device with CWM. Is there anything more needed for it to work?

rvp

ajgraves Any thoughts on accomplishing this without the right click first?

I had a feeling this would come up...

You could map one of the useless keys (how 'bout the Menu key?) to mouse-button 4, then use that instead.

pfr

Please excuse my missunderstanding. but I've ~~added~~ copied the above example of mouse.conf into place (which previously did not exist) and right clicking on any webpage will obviously bring up the right-click menu. I'm not quite sure how it is supposed to work.

rvp

pfr You can use other mouse buttons--the middle one:

    Option      "EmulateWheelButton" "2"

pfr

rvp
Oh damn, I didn't realise I needed to hold down the right mouse button!
Ok it works, Cheers. I'll set it to te middle button

EDIT:

Here's a curve ball for ya.. Is there a way to set tablet scrolling mode? ie. opposite direction scrolling, swipe up on trackpad scrolls the page down and vice versa. YAxisMapping perhaps?

rvp

pfr Is there a way to set tablet scrolling mode?

Try:

Option      "YAxisMapping" "5 4"

Ie. switch the numbers around.

pfr opposite direction scrolling, swipe up on trackpad scrolls the page down and vice versa.

Now we're really getting weird 😆