Installing Ubuntu 19.10 on Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 2) and P1 (Gen 2)

I recently bought a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 laptop and I found that it is not that easy to install any Linux distribution on it. Today, the best distribution choice seems to be ArchLinux for this machine but Ubuntu 19.10 also works: I run Pycharm, Jupyter and Docker whitout issue.

Here I will explain how I have installed Ubuntu 19.10 on this laptop. The proposed method should also work on a ThinkPad P1 (Gen 2) since it is very similar to the X1 Extreme Gen2.

First, the method could work on Ubuntu 18.04+ but if the kernel version of your distribution is less than 5.1 you will have to upgrade manually your kernel up to 5.1.x to have the wifi driver iwlwifi ready in order to have access to the internet (you can Try Ubuntu before installing it to experiment kernel and drivers installation). The Ubuntu 19.10 kernel version is 5.3.

Now we will see how to install Ubuntu along with Windows:

• First, create a bootable USB Stick for Ubuntu.
• (Optional) Make a backup and/or make a partition where Ubuntu will be installed.
• Setup Windows 10. Disable Windows 10 fast startup because when it is enabled, your computer doesn’t perform a regular shut down: instead it builds hibernation files that you want avoid when dual-booting.
• Update UEFI/BIOS to 1.26 (initially my UEFI/BIOS was up to v1.17) since old UEFI/BIOS contain multiple bugs that can result in bricking the laptop. You can perform it using the Lenovo Vantage app under Windows 10.
• Disable Secure Boot: it is a verification mechanism for ensuring that code launched by a computer’s UEFI firmware is trusted. The issue is that NVIDIA Drivers are not signed hence Secure Boot would interrupt the boot process.
• Install Ubuntu by hitting Enter on startup and selecting your bootable USB stick. Now you have Ubuntu installed on your laptop but it crashes when loading the default Ubuntu’s Nouveau NVIDIA Driver. Consequently we will blacklist it and installing the NVIDIA proprietary driver which works fine.
• To do so, Reboot the computer. In the GRUB menu press E to edit the command before booting then append ‘nomodeset’ at the end of the ‘linux…’ line : it will prevent the system from loading graphics drivers hence we will be able to install NVIDIA drivers and blacklisting the Nouveau driver. Don’t worry, ‘nomodeset’ will only be effective for that session.
• Thus, install last NVIDIA proprietary driver.
• Blacklist Nouveau driver to avoid conflicts. Now the NVIDIA proprietary drivers are installed on your system and the open-source Nouveau driver is blacklisted so no conflicts between graphics drivers should happen.

I hope everything should works fine.

Please tell me if something went wrong and if you want clearer explanations.

Thanks to:

• Rong Ou
• Andrea Nicolai
• Ask Ubuntu people.
• All those who have shared knowledge.