Tag: Lenovo

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Now available: Fedora on Lenovo laptops!

We’ve been teasing this for a while, but today it’s finally true—Fedora Workstation is now available preinstalled on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 laptops. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is available today for direct consumer purchase from Lenovo’s online store. The Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 and ThinkPad P53 will be available next week via the “Contact Us” icon on Lenovo.com. What’s more, the successor models are in the works for pre-load and online ordering as well!

Lenovo has been a great partner in bringing this to market. Like the Fedora community, they are operating on an “upstream first” model. That’s part of why the only thing you’ll see on the laptop that doesn’t come from an official Fedora repository is a set of PDFs providing documentation and legal notices. Lenovo engineers have been contributing to the Linux kernel, including a patch to enable the “lap mode” sensor, which is already accepted. They have also worked with their vendors to improve Linux support in devices like the fingerprint scanner.

Of course, you already know that open source is about more than just the technology; the community is what makes it great. Lenovo is a member of Fedora and other communities. In addition to participating in the usual Fedora places (like the devel mailing list), they also were a gold-level sponsor of our Nest With Fedora conference. And they have a dedicated Fedora section on their community forum. Mark Pearson, Senior Linux Developer said “doing open source the right way is important to us” at his Nest With Fedora Q&A session.

This will be a global program, but it will take some time to roll out country-by-country. If it doesn’t appear on the website in your country, call the local sales number for your country to place a phone order. I’m excited to have Lenovo offer Fedora Workstation as a supported choice on their laptops. This is a great opportunity to grow our community.

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Coming soon: Fedora on Lenovo laptops!

Today, I’m excited to share some big news with you—Fedora Workstation will be available on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops! Yes, I know,  many of us already run a Fedora operating system on a Lenovo system, but this is different. You’ll soon be able to get Fedora pre-installed by selecting it as you customize your purchase. This is a pilot of Lenovo’s Linux Community Series – Fedora Edition, beginning with ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8 laptops, possibly expanding to other models in the future.

The Lenovo team has been working with folks at Red Hat who work on Fedora desktop technologies to make sure that the upcoming Fedora 32 Workstation is ready to go on their laptops. The best part about this is that we’re not bending our rules for them. Lenovo is following our existing trademark guidelines and respects our open source principles. That’s right—these laptops ship with software exclusively from the official Fedora repos! When they ship, you’ll see Fedora 32 Workstation. (Models which can benefit from the NVIDIA binary driver can install it in the normal way after the fact, by opting in to proprietary software sources.) 

Obviously, this is huge for us. Our installer aims to make the complicated process of installing Fedora to replace another operating system as easy as possible, but it’s still a barrier even for tech-literate people. A major-brand laptop with Fedora pre-installed will help bring Fedora to a wider audience. That and Lenovo’s commitment to fixing issues as part of the community means that everyone benefits from their Linux engineering work in the true spirit of open source collaboration. 

As Mark Pearson, Sr. Linux Developer, from Lenovo said, “Lenovo is excited to become a part of the  Fedora community. We want to ensure an optimal Linux experience on our products. We are committed to working with and learning from the open source community.” Mark Pearson will be the featured guest in May’s Fedora Council Video Meeting – get your questions ready.

I’ll have more details about this project as we get closer to the launch. In the meantime, I invite you to come to our Open Neighborhood virtual booth at Red Hat Summit on April 28-29. The entire event is free and open to all.