Lenovo Linux Driver

[Su Mcdowall]

withthe laptop it does not have a eithernet port so at the moment to get any internet on any of the linux distros i have to teather it via bluetooth on my phone due to a driver not being in the kernel

Some new Yoga laptops (like the Yoga 530) come with rtl8821ce as the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip. But the ideapad-laptop module, which may come included in your distribution, may conflict with this driver. To disable:

I then try and do sudo modprobe 8821ce and this gives me modprobe: error: ould not insert 8821ce: operation not permitted. And it does not seem to have any way of starting up the wifi so im a bit stuck there.

Do you have the kernel headers installed for your currently loaded kernel. If you are building against mismatched headers, it will not load. This is like the nVidia DKMS issue each time a new kernel is released.

By default, Debian tries to not taint your install with proprietary and not free stuff. Unless you adhere to that philosophy, do what @hem and add the main contrib non-free tags to your apt sources list.

I'm having some problems with the Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II. Specifically the problem I'm trying to solve is the very annoying 'middle-click-after-scrolling'

effect when you use the on-keyboard buttons. The issue is described in this post

My problem is that it seems like immediately after plugging in the keyboard, the driver continues to work fine for a non-deterministic period of time (anywhere between a couple of seconds and 1-2 mins) and then the middle button paste events are being sent after scrolling again.

As stated in the linked post, the kernels after 5.19 should include the patch for this keyboard, however it seems like the issue is back.

Could you please help me with investigating the issue?

Is it possible that some new kernel updates have broken it again?

Is there anyone here using this keyboard without issues on their machine?

For reference, my machine has a built-in trackpoint and there are no middle-click-after-scroll issues present.

You can see a related discussion on the lenovo support here

It seems like the root cause is some bug in the keyboard fimware and the kernel patch was supposed to be a workaround.

Hello! I have the exact same problem (same keyboard, also using the dongle). It started today after I upgraded the kernel from 6.6.2 to 6.6.3. Haven't yet tried going back to 6.6.2, but will try now.

If you find a solution, please post it here. I will do the same.

Older Compact USB keyboards have very similar problems on laptop suspend/resume. The suspend cycle reset the keyboard, so the driver needs to send the middle-button command again. This is what the patch you found does, sends all the config commands on resume.

Thank you mulch569 and lentinj for helping me investigate the issue. One thing I'm not sure about is that the keyboard I'm using is the Thinkpad Wireless Keyboard II, which to my understanding behaves in a different way than the USB and Bluetooth Thinkpad Compact Keyboard that was used for testing. I will try to disable the autosuspend and see if that fixes the issue.

As for the default behaviour, is it indeed the case that after you stop scrolling with the middle button the keyboard sends an additional middle button press? It causes undesired issues where e.g. if I scroll a web page and after scrolling the cursor lands on a link, the middle button is pressed on release of the scrolling and i end up with that linked opened in a new tab (which is the expected behaviour of a single middle button click). To my understanding the kernel patch that I linked in my original post aimed to fix it at the kernel level (as the keyboard sends those keypresses anyway I think) Do you know whom I should contact to investigate the state of TP Compact II patches?

I will try playing aroud with powertop to prevent that usb autosuspend. Anyways thanks for helping me dig into this, much appreciated.

In which case would you say downgrading the kernel is the only option right now to restore the previous behaviour where no middle clicks are registered after releasing the middle button that was held down for scrolling?

I have investigated the issue using xev and it seems like there is something happening almost immediately after I plug the keyboard in, the test went as follows:

-> unplug the keyboard

-> plug it back in

-> launch xev

-> start scrolling

-> for the first couple of seconds no middle button clicks are registered after scrolling is released

-> after that something changes (the keyboard is constantly being used with the trackpoint so an autosuspend is unlikely)

-> the subsequent tests show that after scrolling the middle button click is registered, as in, the keyboard is back to the 'default' state .

I think that lentinj is saying that pasting after scrolling is the default behavior of the keyboard in Linux without any patches. And since it is definitely annoying, the kernel driver that they wrote was doing something to prevent that behavior.

I've been using this keyboard for almost two years with many kernel versions, and just as I installed 6.6.3 the issues began. And as soon as I rolled back to 6.6.2 everything went back to normal. I will stay in 6.6.2 until I have some time to try to fix it (hopefully this weekend).

e.g. if I scroll a web page and after scrolling the cursor lands on a link, the middle button is pressed on release of the scrolling and i end up with that linked opened in a new tab (which is the expected behaviour of a single middle button click).

I just tested 6.6.4 today and it seems that the issue persists. It might be worth reaching out to the kernel maintainers responsible for that commit. Do you know what's the preferred pathway for reporting such issues?

Update 12.12.2023: I contacted the author of the kernel patch that was causing the issue. He has already submitted a fix which will only enable that change for the correct (TP usb compact) keyboard and leave the TP Trackpoint keyboard II unaffected. Once the patch lands in the stable kernel and gets included in the arch repos, we should be able to use the keyboard without any issues with the latest kernel.

BTW, thank you all on this thread for proving, once again, that Arch continues to have the best wiki and fora for esoteric problems such as this. I was unable to find this matter discussed anywhere else.

My keyboard has the original firmware, and, ever since 6.6.3 (which includes this commit) I get the same false behavior of paste-after-scroll described above. The issue starts after reboot (or re-loading hid-lenovo) after some apparently random amount of time. I suppose the "stop applying workaround" condition is triggered at some point, though it is unclear to me why. It would be useful if some more users of the KU-1255 keyboard with original firmware could comment here to confirm that the latest patch to hid-lenovo.c does not fix the issue.

I have the original keyboard (USB version) and can confirm it started behaving weirdly after a kernel upgrade I did 2 days ago, but it just started behaving wrongly like 1h ago, after multiple suspend cycles (I don't upgrade that often, don't shame me).

Firstly, thanks so much for creating that thread! Immensely useful, after 5mn I thought I was the only one to have the problem, but there it was after a bit of digging after I isolated the problem to `hid-lenovo`. At first, I thought it wasn't loaded, but it was, so that's not it.

The kb stopped working (expected), but instead of reloading the module, I tried to power cycle the keyboard again. This loaded the kernel module again and the keyboard now works as expected. So it's another workaround I can use when it occasionally fails.

I recently came upon this thread and decided to remove the temporary configuration I had created to address the bothersome effect of the text pasting or links opening automatically after scrolling.

I disabled the middle button pasting with the following command, the downside of it is that you have to highlight the text and use shift+ins to paste it instead of click the middle button to do it like in any default Thinkpad laptop setup.

That's great to hear, thanks for letting us know!

I tested it again on my keyboard (the Trackpoint Keyboard II - not the usb one) and it seems like the middle

click issue after scrolling is gone. That's great news!

For reference, I'm running the 6.7.1-arch1-1 kernel version.

Thanks everyone involved in this conversation. I'm gonna mark it as solved now.

I double-checked, and I think the reason it works fine for me is that I'm using the wireless keyboard II and I was waiting for the patch that was committed on the 12th of December ( here )

It seems like the fix that I needed was to just restrict the previous problematic patch (the one from September 2023) so that it doesn't act on the second generation of the keyboard.

It could be the case that the other patch (the one applied on the 24th of Jan) is the one that aims to fix the issues with the original usb compact keyboard that were reported by saveman71 and m101.

I think we would need them to confirm that their hardware is fixed.

Hi,

Thanks for your query in Quectel forums.

We cannot provide this linux driver directly to the end user, because there will be authentication problems when installing this driver. Lenovo will launch a customized ubuntu in the future. It is recommended that you obtain it from Lenovo.

Thanks.

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