I recently got my hands on a ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 with an Intel i7 9850H, an NVIDIA Quadro T2000, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, and a 500 nits FHD display (which is AWESOME!) Since there's an empty RAM slot and an empty SSD slot I upgraded it with another 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD. I plan to keep the OEM Windows 10 intact on the 500 GB drive (for making slides and playing games) and install Arch on the 1 TB one.
I mostly followed the great an-idiots-guide-to-installing-arch-on-a-lenovo-carbon-x1-gen-6 when installing arch, and I note the differences in this document.
The Windows installation comes with a EFI partition itself, so we don't have to create a new EFI partition for /boot.
Simply create the partitions for the root directory and (optionally) the home directory and mount the EFI partition on the Windows drive as /boot.
Here's my lsblk output:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme1n1 259:0 0 477G 0 disk
├─nvme1n1p1 259:1 0 260M 0 part /boot
├─nvme1n1p2 259:2 0 16M 0 part
├─nvme1n1p3 259:3 0 475.7G 0 part
└─nvme1n1p4 259:4 0 1000M 0 part
nvme0n1 259:5 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:6 0 512M 0 part
└─nvme0n1p2 259:7 0 931G 0 part
└─cryptlvm 254:0 0 931G 0 crypt
├─main_group-swap 254:1 0 32G 0 lvm [SWAP]
├─main_group-root 254:2 0 256G 0 lvm /
└─main_group-home 254:3 0 643G 0 lvm /home
You could probably guess that nvme1n1 is the Windows drive, and nvme0n1 is the linux one.
nvme0n1p1 is the EFI partition I created following the guide, and is not necessary.
nvme1n1p1 is the EFI partition on the Windows drive.
If you use systemd-boot as your bootloader, then it will automatically detect the Windows Boot Manager and make an entry for it.
I followed the wiki and installed the following
sudo pacman -S nvidia xf86-video-intel mesa bumblebee lib32-virtualgl lib32-nvidia-utils
and added my username to the bumblebee group.
Everything works out of the box.
You can test it using
optirun nvidia-smi
It should tell you you have a Quadro T2000.
Somehow Lenovo likes to wire the HDMI output to the iGPU. To connect to a external monitor, you'll have to configure
Bumblebee and the X server following this. Everytime you connect the HDMI cable, run optirun intel-virtual-output.
If it doesn't complain, you'll able to access your external display.
TODO
You may or may not want to undervolt your CPU. I did, and it helped a little with the thermals.
Simply install the intel-undervolt AUR package, and modify /etc/intel-undervolt.conf for your taste.
Enabling the systemd service intel-undervolt.service activates it.
I used -135 mV undervolt for CPU and cache, but it really depends on your preference.
I used thinkfan to deal with the fan speed. It feels much smoother than the Windows fan control (which is shitty).
I installed the following packages
pacman -S thinkfan tpapi-bat lm-sensorsReboot, and make a copy of the sample config
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/thinkfan/examples/thinkfan.conf.simple /etc/thinkfan.confUncomment the following line from the sample config
tp_fan /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
and enable thinkfan.service. The fan is now under control!
I need to type Chinese from time to time so I need a input method. My favorite is RIME.
I use KDE, so I installed the following packages for fcitx:
pacman -S fcitx-im fcitx-rime kcm-fcitxAfter a relogin fcitx will start automatically.
The following lines needs to be added to ~/.pam_environment to have fcitx work properly in some applications.
GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx
I needed YubiKey for some of my accounts. For Firefox simply install libu2f-host and it will work fine in most cases.
Display scaling is done mostly following the wiki. I use KDE, so I simply forced a font scaling factor of 1.25 (dpi=120). Most KDE and Qt apps can be scaled in the KDE system settings, under "Appearance -> Fonts -> Force font DPI".
Firefox is a GTK app and GTK only allows integer scaling.
One way to get around this is to go to about:config and change the value of layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.25.
Most Chromium- or Electron- based apps accepts a command line parameter --force-device-scale-factor.