The ArchWiki stands as a testament to the dedication and care of the Arch Linux user community and has long been the envy of other distros. Although only topics germane to Arch Linux are to be documented, the level of detail and breadth of information have proven to be useful to users of other distros as well. As outlined in the following LWN article, the Debian project invited a pair of ArchWiki maintainers to DebConf25 to discuss the ArchWiki management strategy as a means to revamp the existing Debian wiki.
I've been a sucker for Lenovo Thinkpads since early 2018 when I bought a used T440 on eBay. They're easy to maintain and modify, they're affordable in the used market, and they seem to have great hardware compatibility for Linux. In total, I own the following Thinkpads:
- IBM Thinkpad T42 - running Windows 98 SE; among the last models produced by IBM. I bought this to run some childhood software favorites from Windows 95 and 98.
- Lenovo T440 Thinkpad - the first Thinkpad I owned, purchased in January 2018. Forgotten in a cabinet until a few months ago. It only has 8Gb of RAM, but that's enough for many tasks in truth.
- Lenovo X230 Thinkpad - purchased with Coreboot installed and in a state of experimentation and modding. Unused for years.
- Lenovo Thinkpad X380 Yoga - I bought this one in July 2022 after tiring from hardware issues with my System76 Oryx Pro 6 and it's been my daily driver for most of the time since.
I don't need four different Thinkpads, but I don't have any reason to get rid of any either. I believe my first permanent Linux installation was Ubuntu Vivid Vervet in 2015 from a cd in some Linux magazine. For many years I enjoyed using Ubuntu, but I found that as time went on, minor issues became major annoyances. In 2023 I installed Debian Bookworm and it ran like a dream. In late 2022 the Debian project held a vote concerning the nonfree repos and ultimately made them accessible as part of the installer for Bookworm. As an Ubuntu user, I always had great respect and admiration for the Debian project, but I didn't have the patience to workaround some of the driver issues I'd encountered with it on some brief experiments. Bookworm on the other hand worked better out of the box than Ubuntu. I happily upgraded to Trixie when it became stable last year, but lingering in the back of my mind was a desire for something more bleeding edge.
I decided my System76 would be perfect for testing it out and immediately fell in love with it. The volume of AUR packages, the speed of pacman, the simplicity of the Arch build system and PKGBUILD files. I quickly took over an orphaned AUR package for a game launcher I wanted to use for playing Adventure Quest. I have much to learn, but appreciated the ease of getting involved.
After finding my old T440 in a file cabinet a few months back, I quickly installed Arch on it. Until then, I used the X380 Yoga with Debian and my System76 with Arch. I found myself reaching for the T440 to write some code here and there until a week ago when the battery started going on the fritz. It would cycle between charging for a few moments and then nothing. The battery was probably over a decade old, so I found a third-party replacement for cheap on Amazon and ordered it with next-day shipping. I had no troubles for a few days, but after accidentally letting my laptop die while unplugged, I suddenly got an error about my third party battery being unsupported and that the system would not charge it. This is troublesome.
After some very brief research, I reset the BIOS settings in an attempt to fix it. I was able to troubleshoot things with the battery removed and the laptop connected to power directly. Not only did this not fix my issue, but it left my laptop unable to boot into Arch. My inclination was to boot up my Arch installation ISO on a USB drive, but security validation errors prevented even that. After disabling Secure Boot and changing from UEFI to Leacy Boot, I was able to boot up the USB drive in the hopes of mending things. I looked in the Arch forums and found a post titled Arch won't boot after motherboard BIOS update. After some brief discussion in the thread, the poster concluded that the the probable sequence for repairing the issue would be
- Update back to latest BIOS version
- reboot with a bootable usb with an Arch.iso
- boot arch-Linux
- Chroot
- Re-install bootloader (GRUB)
Another user affirmed that that the fix would largely mirror some steps of the installation in terms of mounting the Linux partition, chrooting into it, installing the kernel and firmware, and configuring a bootloader.
In my case, I mostly followed these instructions, though it was unnecessary for me to update to a particular BIOS version since I merely reset the settings for my given BIOS version.
After connecting to my network with iwctl I viewed my partitions with
fdisk -lFollowing the portion of the installation guide for mounting filesystems, I ran
mount /dev/sda3 /mntI then used arch-chroot to access my intact Arch system.
arch-chroot /mntFollowing the forum post, I reinstalled the linux, linux-firmware, and grub packages.
pacman -Sy linux linux-firmware grubWith the GRUB package installed, I followed the instructions to install GRUB to my boot partition
grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sdaI followed the instructions for my setup, GPT/BIOS, in order to generate the GRUB main configuration file.
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfgAfter completing those steps, I rebooted, removed the USB drive, and was thilled to see the GRUB splash screen with Arch listed, followed quickly by my GNOME login screen. I re-inserted my battery and rebooted to success. No more battery issues! If this happens in the future, I'll try the Lenovo Thinkpad Emergency Reset Hole first. It disengages both the main battery and cmos battery, then restarts the laptop. I learned a valuable lesson about fiddling with BIOS settings based on insufficient research, but also engaged in the troubleshooting made simple by the the resources afforded to Arch users.