OpenBSD on Thinkpad X1 Carbon 4th Generation

In previous posts, I’ve detailed my movement away from all things Apple and my configuration of how to get OpenBSD installed on this laptop.  Now that I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a few months, I thought it would be worth revisiting the tweaks and configuration changes I’ve had to make to get really comfortable on this machine.  Given that, here we go…

For my particular model, I decided to turn all of the dials up to 11 in the configuration screens on the Lenovo website.  I have the 1TB NVMe drive, 16 GB of RAM and the 2560×1440 HiDPI display.  The latter has made things a bit interesting but since this is the future, I have been pressing on and solving the problems it has brought about!

The first thing I had to configure, based on some very nice work by Reyk was my /etc/xorg.conf file to turn on the efifb driver since we don’t have Skylake support yet in OpenBSD.  My particular configuration looks exactly like his:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "default monitor"
DisplaySize 311 170
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “default device”
Driver “wsfb”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “default scren”
Device “default device”
Monitor “default monitor”
EndSection

Once you have that in place, you can do a “startx” from the command line to ensure that you have graphics working correctly.  After that, I installed my favorite BSD-licensed desktop environment, Lumina and configured my .xinitrc file to start it for me:

exec start-lumina-desktop

Now we have the fact that the trackpad gets a little wonky (a technical term) using the defaults.  Through some trial and error, I found the following line, added above the “exec start-lumina-desktop” in my .xinitrc gets things working the way I would like them to:

synclient VertScrollDelta=-107 HorizScrollDelta=-107 ClickFinger2=3 PalmDetect=1 PalmMinWidth=5 PalmMinZ=100 HorizHysteresis=50 VertHysteresis=50 ClickTime=50

Next, we have the HiDPI stuff to contend with.  I installed the xcursor-themes package and used the “whiteglass” theme.  By adding the following to your .profile, you will get the “desired” behavior (fonts big enough you can read, etc.) out of the HiDPI setup:

export GDK_SCALE=2
export XCURSOR_SIZE=36
export XCURSOR_PATH=/usr/local/lib/X11/icons
export XCURSOR_THEME=whiteglass

For Lumina, I configured the Lumina Glass color scheme and the Glass (System) theme with a 10 point font size.

With all of this done, you end up with a very usable desktop!