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Setting up Xubuntu in Lenovo Flex2 14D

Lenovo Flex2 14D is a good laptop with decent build quality, light weight, 14" screen and touch screen for those who like it. With AMD A6 processor version, it is reasonably priced too.

It comes pre-loaded wth Windows 8.1 and a bunch of Lenovo software. If you want to get this to dual boot with Ubuntu Linux, here are the specific fixes you need to do.

Installation

• Pretty straight forward. You need to know how to go to bios and disable secure boot and set the boot order to boot first from USB. This is documented elsewhere in Ubuntu documentation. In a nutshell, you go to Windows 8.1 > Configure PC > Advanced Settings > Boot to UEFI / BIOS settings (I don’t remember exact verbiage).
• Prepare a bootable USB with mint-17-xfce-amd64 version. I first installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 - that was unusuable due to Compiz taking up 100% CPU all the time.
• Boot via Linux Mint installer. Install. I resized Windows partition to about 80GB, added one 220 GB NTFS partition for data, one 50GB for Linux, 8GB for swap, and 160GB for /home.
• You will also need an ethernet cable since Wifi is not detected out of the box.
• It actually goes much faster if you remove internet access during installation.

Post Installation

• Connect to the net via ethernet cable.
• Do the usual sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Get Wifi Working

• Go to Applications > Update Manager, Advanced tab and select the latest kernel for installation. I upgraded to 3.13.0-35.
• It will take some time and requires a reboot.
• Now WiFi should work. However, it drops often. To fix that, do the following, assuming youve Realtek 8723 card. Do a dmesg|grep rtl and look at the output to ensure it is 8723.

  
    echo "options rtl8723be fwlps=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723be.conf
  

• One more reboot is needed. Now WiFi should be stable.

Get Display Driver Working

• I used the default driver and found that while playing videos or while scrolling vertically, screen just jumps.
• To fix this, go to Applications > Driver Manager
• It will say that the recommended X.org driver is being used. Change it to fglrx-updates driver. Better to reboot after this.
• Touch pad sensitivity may not be to your liking. Go to Applications > Touchpad and adjust it. Note that by default, the touchpad selected is the screen - you need to use the dropdown to select the trackpad.
• I don’t really use touch screen, so never bothered to get the multi-touch working.

Get Better Battery Life

• Install TLP. http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03/tlp-05-released-install-it-in-ubuntu.html
• XFCE4 in this has an issue. When you close the laptop lid and the machine gets suspended. But when you open the lid, it comes back on, but display is blank. This is fixed in XFCE4 dev channels. We can get those power management utils.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install xfce4-power-manager light-locker-settings

• It is better to reboot after these are done. Now go to Applications > Software Sources, choose PPA and remove xubuntu-dev:ppa source and binary. You also have to do a Reload Cache.

After all these, I had a system I am comfortable with. Install additional software you might want to use.