Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

[jmontelius]

About to order a Lenov Yoga 2 Pro, and would like share some experience and hear what others have done to get things to work. The laptop has a touch screen and can be folded into a tablet, moreover it has a 1800x3200 screen which it a bit absurd for a 13" screen but who am I to complain.

My intension is to use the regular KDE Desktop when used as a laptop but then hope to switch to something more touch friendly when turned into a tablet. I've seen Kubuntu Active but don't know if it will work on the Yoga (tried to install it on my desktop without success) . The ideal would of course be if one could switch between Desktop, Netbook and Active on the fly (or even automatic when folding to tablet). Any experience is appreciated.

I'll be back with my experience when I have the hardware.

[jmontelius]

Firts look

Unpacked it and it looks amazing: the texture of the outside, feels solid when flipping, the screen is the sharpest I've seen. Now running Kubuntu out-of-the-box is however not to be recommended. So far I've only tested it from a LiveCD and things of course work but the high screen resolution makes things hard to use. I changed the default fonts, which improved things, icons are mostly too small to be useful. I'm sure this can be tweaked but it's nothing I could do in half an hour. The touch screen works but there are some bugs that makes it useless; an icon in the task bar can be selected but not clicked; you can't open up the launcher!

I'm sure things are better in KDE 4.12 and will improve in 4.13 and I will give them a try when I have some more time.

How to launch Kubuntu from a USB stick:

1: press the small button next to the power button to enter BIOS
2: change booting options from UEFI to Legacy Boot, choose Legacy First and disable Lenovo Fast Boot
3: hit F6 when prompted to try Kubuntu, edit the boot command to include acpi_backlight=vendor
4: when started, open up a terminal and run sudo rmmod ideapad_laptop

[Feathers McGraw]

That's a very nice laptop you have there! Care to take a photo of it with Kubuntu running? I wanted a photo of a nice laptop running Kubuntu a while ago and couldn't find one on Google images.

Can't you drag the task bar so that it resizes? I'm sure I've done it by accident before. If you make it taller the icons get bigger...

[GerardV]

Looks very interesting. Can you run a external monitor via the HDMI port ?

[jmontelius]

Hi,

I resized the task-bar ok, and the icons scalled well (except for the icons to resize the bar etc). Probems remain though since the "System Tray" for example does not scale, leaving all incons inside it too small.

As I said earlier the touch screen works ... sort of, its up and running but some things do not work. One can "select" icons in the task bar but not click them. I also found out that when I rotated the screen to display properly in "tent" mode, the touch screen was ... not rotated, input from the touch screen did not follow the image screen. This probably make sens for the touch panel on the key board, but it's of course useless when trying to navigate using the screen :-)

Will check the external screen, need an mini-hdmi adpater.

Sorry for the photo, not the best :-/

[jmontelius]

Update - clicking using the touch screen worked ... for a while... Switched over to 1920x1080 and it was working as expected. Back to 3200x1800, ok, then .. no more, back to 1920x1080 ... no luck. Hmmm, there is someting strange with the support for clicking.

Switching over to Notebook and then back to Desktop makes the touch screen clicking work, ... and then it is gone after having plaued around with the windows... very strange

[SteveRiley]

Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook really aren't designed for touchscreen devices. Try installing Plasma Active:

sudo tasksel install kubuntu-active

[jmontelius]

Tried the Kubuntu build of Plasma Active (running from livecd 14.04), it started but the screen was all black except a working cursor (could switch to tty1 and there was an error in dmesg but did not have time to investigate). Active was running in the background but something prevented it from using the terminal properly.

Tried to boot using the Basyskom version (stable from September) but that one could not boot properly.

Starting to relalize that I will probably need Plasma Active or similar if I'm going to use it as a tablet (which I do want). Will create a dual boot, install Kubuntu and then try to get Active to work from there.

[jmontelius]

... tried kubuntu-active on my desktop (no touch screen) and it worked so so, the mouse was not visible so it was close to impossible to navigate, looked very nice though


then ... haven't used tasksel before, .. I did

sudo tasksel remove kubuntu-active

Hmm, that was a lot of packages, .... wait a minute - holy ?#%

greping through /var/log/dpgk.log gave me all packages that had been removed (many)

cat /var/log/dpkg.log |grep -oP "(?<=`date +%Y-%m-%d`\s\d\d\:\d\d:\d\d\sremove)\s\S*\s" > restore

a bit of editing, removing everything related to active, and then

sudo apt-get install $(for i in $(cat restore); do echo -n "$i "; done;)

and I'm up and running :-)

[jmontelius]

Up and running with 13.10 and dual boot (booting windows require to change the BIOS boot option to UEFI so takes some time to switch).

Changing some setting for fonts ad window borders etc the desktop is now good but not perfect. Dolphin looks very good since most things adapted to the high resolution. Using FF rather than Rekonq since it handles the resolution better and that I quickly found an add-on that enabled two finger scroling.

Touch screen is still a problem since it does not work to click any plasma widgets, yiu can select but not click... but as a I said I got it somehow to work when switching to Netbook so it should work.

Will try some more things in Desktop mode before trying Active.

[Feathers McGraw]

Nice! Good progress

[jmontelius]

Installed kubuntu-active and created a econd user to try it out with. The start-up phase took for ever but then the login screen appeared and I logged in using the Plasma Active ...... long time .... very nice picture with nice icons in the corner ..... that's it, no respons from the touch pad nor the touch screen - nada. Switch to tty 1 and have some logs to look at but where do you start :-) Will have to find the Active groups and start asking a few questions, if it works it could be a nice solution even if one has to switch user when moving from Desktop to Active.

[SteveRiley]

sudo tasksel remove kubuntu-active

Hmm, that was a lot of packages, .... wait a minute - holy ?#%

tasksel is something of a brute when it comes to removing tasks. It will remove every package in the task's list, and all their corresponding dependencies, even if they're needed by something else. This might have worked better:

sudo apt-get purge kubuntu-active

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

The first removes only the kubuntu-active metapackage; the second removes automatically-installed packages that are no longer needed -- which would likely encompass the guts of kubuntu-active now that the metapackage that pulled them all in is gone.

Touch screen is still a problem since it does not work to click any plasma widgets, yiu can select but not click... but as a I said I got it somehow to work when switching to Netbook so it should work.

If you can figure this out, we'd be interested. Plasma Desktop isn't designed for fingers and will have trouble distinguishing between click-to-drag and click-to-select. I'm surprised it did anything resembling expected behavior in Netbook.

Installed kubuntu-active and created a econd user to try it out with. The start-up phase took for ever but then the login screen appeared and I logged in using the Plasma Active ...... long time .... very nice picture with nice icons in the corner ..... that's it, no respons from the touch pad nor the touch screen - nada. Switch to tty 1 and have some logs to look at but where do you start :-) Will have to find the Active groups and start asking a few questions, if it works it could be a nice solution even if one has to switch user when moving from Desktop to Active.

You're using the Basykom build here, right? I was a bit surprised to see they've removed their x86 downloads from the Plasma Active page. Not sure why that is. IRC is probably your best bet for Plasma Active support. Be sure to let the folks there know what kind of touch panel you have, they might know where you can get a driver for it.

[jmontelius]

The lack of clicking using the screen starts to make sense now. I can click window icons, tabs, borders etc ... It's only Plasma stuff that does not recognize clicks. Doesn't help the situation but closer but at least the stack at some level interprets touch and release as a click. Plasma interprets this as "mouse over" and removing the finger does not generate any event.

The Kubuntu Active that I've installed is the one in the 13.10 repositor (the one I tried from Basykom that I tried did not even boot). The lack of a pointer has been reported before. Plasma Active does interpret mouse movements and one can se how things light up when the non-visible mouse is over an icon. I'll see if I can find out more on whats going on.

[travsformer]

Hi,

I'm considering a Yoga 2 Pro, and am wondering how the progress is going, 9 months later, since Kubuntu is my distro of choice, and what will be replacing Win8.

I'm not much of a touchscreen fan, so I'm not too concerned about that part, just interested in the general Yoga-buntu experience, (particularly the subject of scaling. Do the changes (changing font DPI right?) apply to all apps, including LibreOffice, etc?

By now, from what I've been able to find there appear to be plenty of tutorials around now on installing, getting Wifi to work, etc. Have you had any issues worth mentioning? How about the laptop itself, how's it holding up?

Thanks in advance, and congrats on your progress!

Cheers!