Unix Support on Lenovo C930?

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Hello everyone,

I’ve recently picked up a Lenovo C930 for coding and what not in my personal time, and I’m having a hell of a time getting all the functionality on linux to work properly.

There are several workarounds that have to be used to get the system to a ‘stable’ setting.

Using Ubuntu 18.10 straight out of the box, I have the following working from the base install. (pretty much everything except microphone, full speaker support, and the sketchy wifi)

  • Webcam
  • Rotation Sensor
  • Lenovo Pen
  • Dimming
  • Trackpad
  • Touch Screen
  • Function Keys
  • Wifi [Requires workaround below]
  • Speakers [not all are working, more on that below]

To get wifi working properly, I have to disable ideapad-laptop using sudo modprobe -r ideapad-laptop and it seems that I have to run this command pretty often (usually every boot) to get wifi working and enabled.
Source Here

The issue is that even if I get the wifi working, it is terribly slow, like it maxes out at a couple mbps. Any suggetions on how to speed this up?

The second issue is the speakers, the speakers that came with this laptop are AMAZING. (at least under windows) I was hoping to get the same experience under ubuntu or another distro if possible. There is a discussion here that talks about reassigning pins but I can’t really wrap my head around it.

Has anybody else purchased a Lenovo C930 and using linux on it? Have you found workarounds for the issues above?

Thanks, Geep

2

Running Linux on new-ish hardware can sometimes be an adventure!

This post addresses making the wifi fix permanent, but if your issue isn’t resolved by the fix, then this isn’t very helpful. I suppose that the wifi module is white-listed in that laptop (f@#* Lenovo!), else it would be simple and relatively cheap to replace it with something else.

For hardware compatibility issues, I generally start by installing the latest kernel, but judging from the link that you provided, it sounds like ALSA may be confused. When in doubt, I always visit the Arch wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture

I don’t know if this is helpful, but I found this note a little ways down:

Unmute 5.1/7.1 sound

To get full 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound you will likely need to unmute other channels such as Front , Surround , Center , LFE (subwoofer) and Side . (Those are channel names with Intel HD Audio, they may vary with different hardware)

Directly above this entry, look for the heading " Unmuting the channels" for specifics on how to perform the task.

Best of luck!

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