Lenovo Ideapad U300s

Booting the Gentoo install CD
To change the boot order, turn off the laptop, then press the system restore button on the outer edge of the laptop. A new menu that appears during boot. You'll notice that this laptop does not have a CD-ROM drive. To boot the install CD you'll need to create an image of the ISO on a USB flash drive. I used, and it was very easy. If you want you can also read Gentoo Linux LiveUSB HOWTO You'll also notice that there is no RJ45 jack on the laptop. The laptop is too thin. I wasn't able to get the wireless card working with the install CD, but I didn't try too hard either. I used a usbnet (the Linux driver module) compatible USB->Ethernet dongle. usbnet is included with the live CD. After plugging in the dongle, run to get the name of the new ethernet NIC. Then run or whatever the name of the interface is. Once you have a connection the rest of the standard amd64 handbook is accurate for this laptop.

BIOS
While you have a Windows install (factory default), head over to the Lenovo website and get the latest BIOS. You need Windows to update your BIOS on this computer. To Enter BIOS menus: 1. Turn off computer completely 2. Press the button on the outer side of the laptop to turn it back on 3. Select the BIOS menu option

This page is up to date with BIOS version 42. There is a BIOS version 43 available but here is the only changelog entry: Latest Version BIOS fixes the following issue: 1. CPU speed may lock at lowest P-State while charging < 80% due to AC-Adapter protection. I haven't seen this happen on Linux.

Kernel 3.5+
If you're running kernel version 3.5 or newer, you're fine. This problem was fixed with the following patch: dbf0e4c7257f8d684ec1a3c919853464293de66e

Kernel 3.4 and lower
Almost works out of the box, but needs hacks to get the USB HCDs to unbind so they don't freeze when they are asked to power down. See this message on the kernel usb mailing list for information on this issue by one of the USB 3.0 top developers. Re: xhci driver, suspend/resume on Lenovo U300 If you want to use the bind/unbind USB hack, here is one way to implement it if you have ACPID and laptop-mode-utils installed:

So, basically after you use the sysfs USB interface all you need to do to sleep is If you're not happy with the HCD unbinding, then you could consider hibernating instead of sleeping. This laptop boots very quickly. 7-10 seconds depending on the install and even faster on resume.

Hibernation
TODO: kernel config setup for hibernation partition. Hibernation will not work out of the box, because of (you guessed it) a BIOS bug. The BIOS will not respond to a hibernate request, but a shutdown request is almost as good. To ask Linux to perform a shutdown instead of a hibernate you need to run the following command every time the computer is booted You can do this by creating the following file.

then

To verify that this is actually working you can run and make sure the the word 'shutdown' is in the square brackets. What's the difference between platform and shutdown you ask? According to the kernel documentation:

The /usr/src/linux/Documentation/power/ directory is full of good sleep and hibernate information and is worth a read.

Wireless
Follow the instructions for Iwlwifi then install I've had some speed issues with kernel version 3.4 and lower with a few APs. Fixed by using a kernel from git and merging the wireless-next repo's master branch. (July 12th 2012)

Audio
Output works perfectly with the Intel HD Audio driver in. The microphone however, does not. There is a quirk for this laptop, and you can read about the work being done on for this here. Long story short, this will be fixed with the 3.5 kernel release.

Touchpad
Works flawlessly.

Tested with Good reading here: Synaptics Touchpad

Hardware Info
lspci lspci -n