Debian Linux on Thinkpad L490

Trackpoint & touchpad and wifi were (hopefully) the only things that didn’t work right after installation of Debian Buster on my Lenovo Thinkpad L490.

Wifi

It didn’t work during installation so I installed using an eth cable and then I had to:

• add non-free and contrib repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list:
  deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
• install firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-iwlwifi packages

Trackpoint & touchpad

To make it work you need to add a parameter to psmouse module. To test if it works:

sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

And to make it permanent:

echo options psmouse proto=imps | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/mouse.conf
sudo update-initramfs -c -k all
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot

Fingerprint reader

I haven’t managed to make it work.

Cooling and Battery Life

There is some problem with cooling or maybe just with some sensors which I still haven’t figured out. dmesg has messages like this quite often:

[69668.650479] mce: CPU0: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 3882682)
[69668.650481] mce: CPU2: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 3882682)
[69668.650482] mce: CPU6: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 3882682)
[69668.651560] mce: CPU5: Package temperature/speed normal
[69668.651561] mce: CPU1: Package temperature/speed normal
[69668.651562] mce: CPU4: Package temperature/speed normal
[69668.651563] mce: CPU0: Package temperature/speed normal

The battery life is definitely not the advertised 12 hours. Or the estimate in Gnome is wrong. It says 76% after being charged for days and 3 hours remaining (!) when unplugged. But I havent done any proper testing.

s-tui output with Gnome running, a few opened Chrome windows and an idle IntelliJ Idea: