My Lenovo DebianPad S10e

My IdeaPad arrived! After playing around with SLED 10, I recognized that I should install Debian on it instead. SLED is a little bit too sluggish :(

• Because I don't have an USB CD-ROM drive, I prepared a bootable USB-key with the Debian 40r6 installer. However, the IdeaPad didn't want to boot from it. The reason was probably my USB-key which refuses to be bootable.
• I found out about a nice way of how to boot an .iso from an USB-key. Here, Debian booted into the installer (using a tmpfs) but could not find a CD-ROM drive for the source of the packages. So I unplugged my USB-key and used my workstation in order to copy the content of the Debian ISO onto the USB-key. Afterwards I mounted it to /cdrom => the installer recognized the source. After creating partitions and user accounts, the Debian installer could not find the codename of its version. This problem was caused by mounting an USB-key to /cdrom instead of a real CD.
• I decided to use the network as the installation source. However, this version of Debian didn't recognize any network devices.
• I decided to try out the Debian installer of the testing branch with the hope that it will recognize some network devices. After rebooting my IdeaPad the MBR of the HDD was gone => I was not able to boot the ISO file from my USB-key anymore.
• After checking all available booting methods in the BIOS I found out that I could use PXE in order to boot from the network. So I set up a bootpd and tftpd on my workstation which provides the PXE installer of Debian testing => The installation of Debian progressed without any flaw; until the first reboot.
• After the first system reboot the kernel could not find my root filesystem. I don't know why, but the installer decided to write /dev/sdb3 instead of /dev/sda3 into the grub configuration. The fstab was affected as well. (Maybe I forgot to unplug my USB-key from the IdeaPad during the PXE install). After manual fixing I had a fresh working installation of Debian :)

• One thing still didn't work out of the box: The WLAN. After installing the closed source Broadcom driver everything worked then.

I like the IdeaPad S10e very much. The glossy display doesn't bother in any way. All hardware works perfectly (built in webcam [skype works out of the box with video-call], audio, wireless network, the display + xorg). And after half an hour you can type on the small keyboard very fast and without any typing errors.

Some critics:

• The CPU fan turns on and off a lot which can be anoying. This is a firmware bug which Lenovo has to fix. I am waiting for it ;)


• I am working in fulltime as a Linux Systemadministrator. So I am using the shell a lot. It is not very comfortable to type the pipe | on this keyboard (don't know if it only affects my german version of the keyboard). You have to press three buttons at a time for the pipe: Fn + AltGr + y. This can be fixed by customizing your keyboard layout.


• It would be nicer to have a TrackPoint instead of a small TouchPad (even if it's multi touch). A TrackPoint would save even more space and it is (in my opintion) more comfortable. I am used to TrackPoints.

But overall the IdeaPad S10e is a pretty nice toy :)