Since the new Lenovo Thinkpad X260 houses the latest hardware like the i7-6500U skylake processor, Huawei ME906s LTE, Intel® Snowfield Peak 2 WiFi 2 x 2 802.11 a/c with Bluetooth® M.2 (vPro™) etc as mentioned here, things like WiFi, the graphics card and the LTE 3G port may not work with the stable release of Debian 8 (Jessie). This is because since you choose Debian stable, the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. Stability at the cost of obsolescence. Fortunately, we have a not-so-unstable unstable version of Jessie aka Debian Jessie backports!
Backporting is the action of taking parts from a newer version of a software system or software component and porting them to an older version of the same software.
– Wikipedia
When it comes to Debian, backports are packages taken from the next Debian release (called “testing”), adjusted and recompiled for usage on Debian stable. Because the packages are also present in the next Debian release, you can easily upgrade your stable+backports system once the next Debian release comes out. (In a few cases, usually for security updates, backports are also created from the Debian unstable distribution.)
Firstly, download and install Debian 8 as one would normally do. I’m not providing any information on this as there are literally thousands of blogs on the internet with information on the same. Google it!
Secondly, when you reach the login screen press CTRL + ALT + F1and it will direct you to a terminal login. Login and run sudo apt-get update, because you know… You know you don’t have to but your OCD makes you do it anyway! After whatever it is you do after you login, you must edit your ‘sources.list’. Run sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
This is how it probably looks.
# Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify: # deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib # Line commented out by installer because it failed to verify: # deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates contrib main # jessie-updates, previously known as 'volatile' # A network mirror was not selected during install. The following entries # are provided as examples, but you should amend them as appropriate # for your mirror of choice. deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie contrib main non-free deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie contrib main non-free
Add the following two lines to the end of it.
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
Save and exit. Then run the following.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt install linux-image-amd64/jessie-backports sudo apt-get update # This is the OCD one! sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # To install linux 4.7 kernel sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports linux-image-4.7.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports linux-headers-4.7.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports xorg sudo reboot #Graphics card sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports xserver-xorg sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports xserver-xorg-video-intel # WiFi sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports firmware-iwlwifi sudo modprobe iwlwifi sudo service network-manager restart
Now you have everything you need to run Debian Jessie smoothly. I’m still working on a solution for the LTE port.
For the fingerprint sensor, fprint seems to be working well for many people. Add the repository if it isn’t already and then install.
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:fingerprint/fprint sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libfprint0 fprint-demo libpam-fprintd
I thought about putting up some screenshots of my Debian Gnome Desktop Environment (DE) to show how it looks, but as it turns out, I have to logout of my awesome i3wm DE. (**whisper** Gnome shell uses a lot of CPU.) So I’m not going to be doing that.
