Thinkpad X250 - Debian (cont'd)

After my original effort to get Debian to play nice on the X250 there were still a handful of things which weren't right. This mostly covers the remainder of the things that I had trouble with.

Automatically updating timezone based on location

I was recently in Vietnam and had to update my timezone manually - which was a minor inconvenience. There's an app called tzupdate which will attempt to determine your location and update the timezone accordingly whenever you run it. We can create a cron job to run tzupdate regularly to ensure the timezone is updated:

    $ sudo pip install -U tzupdate
    $ sudo crontab -e

enter the following - it'll cause tzupdate to run on the hour, every hour

    0 * * * * tzupdate

Two-fingered scroll left/right

When setting up my touchpad I neglected to setup the left/right scrolling - adding the followng line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf resolves this:

    Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"

For more info on the Synaptics touchpad driver, as always ArchLinux has some excellent documentation on the subject.

iPhone - Bluetooth and USB tethering 

Connecting over bluetooth is a little funny and can trouble you in unpredictable ways. Basically network manager overwrites /etc/resolv.conf when it connects/disconnects from a network and blueman doesn't touch it. So as you connect/disconnect from networks your bluetooth connection can be effectively useless as it'll be unable to resolve DNS queries (I'm guessing most people go to http://facebook.com and not http://31.13.76.68)

Easiest way is to prevent network manager from touching resolv.conf - and make sure you have a handful of good nameservers you can rely on. To do this edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and add the following to the [main] section:

    dns=none

Then add a handful of dns services to  /etc/resolv.conf:

    $ cat > /etc/resolv.conf << RESOLVEND
    #Google Public DNS
    nameserver 8.8.8.8
    nameserver 8.8.4.4
    
    # OpenDNS
    nameserver 208.67.222.222 
    nameserver 208.67.220.220
    RESOLVEND

Connecting over USB is a little easier

    $ sudo modprobe ipheth

If you're having trouble then apparently ipheth sometimes requires the iphone filesystem to be mounted - which means installing ifuse:

    $ sudo apt-get install libimobiledevice-dev libfuse-dev
    $ git clone https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse
    $ cd ifuse/
    $ ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && sudo make install
    $ mkdir ~/iPhone && sudo ifuse ~/iPhone

Thinkpad X250's Mobile Broadband setup (Vodafone CZ)

I had a bit of a nightmare of a time connecting to Vodafone using the builtin 4G modem. I think the main thing is that most places on the internet say that for pre-paid SIM you should set the APN to "ointernet" - when actually "internet" is correct. However I did find that I needed to set prefer_mbim to Y for the device:

    $ sudo echo "options cdc_ncm prefer_mbim=Y" >> /etc/modprobe.d/cdc_ncm.conf
You can either setup the connection using the NetworkManager UI and make it match the below:

... or manually create a file in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ like the below:
    $ sudo cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/Vodafone\ CZ
    [connection]
    id=Vodafone CZ
    uuid=2756323d-e364-49dc-9d86-92b8c2a44d15
    type=gsm
    autoconnect=false
    permissions=
    secondaries=

    [gsm]
    apn=internet
    number=*99***1#
    password-flags=1
    pin=1234

    [serial]
    baud=115200

    [ipv4]
    dns=8.8.8.8;
    dns-search=
    method=auto
 
    [ipv6]
    addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
    dns-search=
    ip6-privacy=0
    method=auto

XTerm looks weird in XFCE

I've since moved nearly full-time to using Xmonad, but when I go back to XFCE and try to use xterm it has an extremely tiny font:

To make them appear a little nicer we need to edit ~/.Xresources - so that it looks like the below

Then fix up .Xresources:

    $ cat .Xresources 
    XTerm*faceName: Source Code Pro
    XTerm*faceSize: 10
    XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
    ! Fonts {{{
    Xft.antialias: true
    Xft.hinting:   true
    Xft.rgba:      rgb
    Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
    Xft.dpi:       120
    ! }}}

After you restart X and relaunch an xterm everything should appear little nicer