Popped in to post about having Mint 21.1 working on the Lafité Pro Series laptop.
Mint 21.1 tested and installed with kernel 15 and worked as expected, WiFi, Ethernet and sound and Bluetooth worked out of the box.
To use the backlit keyboard use the same guide I wrote back in 2020 that's kindly stickied here, it works just fine and allows setting the keyboard light level, its colour and the F1 key to enable or disable the touch pad, use the provided 'colour selection' tool to obtain the colour code you want the backlight to be, this is found in the mint menu.
Virtualbox installs and works but if it doesn't, check in the bios that VT-D is enabled.
I have installed kernel Kernel Linux 6.0.0-1013-oem x86_64 to test and found while it does make a positive difference, it also throws a few errors about ignoring the driver for the tux-keyboard, everything still works just that on boot you may see a few pesky error messages, if I can solve those I will update this post.
I have also tested Tuxedo OS 2 on this laptop, its a very customised version of Xubuntu created for the German Tuxedo range of custom computers, it includes a custom kernel 6 and an in house control center and the custom keyboard control all located in the Tux control center. It used KDE as its desktop environment and while it works for the most part and is rather nice to use, it has a few bugs that I will list :
1] Root access has been removed in the recent KDE versions but can be added with a KDE plugin to allow root access to folders.
The GUI for the firewall needs some work, it requests the root password twice and can crash, a reboot solves it so if you enable the firewall, expect it to be a pain but it will come up as enabled on reboot.
2] For those of you who use Eddie VPN client, the icon in the panel doesnt scale very well, it look off but Eddie does work just fine.
3] There are some idiotic quirks with its version of 'KDEUSB boot disc creator' it seems locked to ubuntu ISO's and will not see its own tuxedo-os ISO, bit of a pain but you can use another boot usb disc tool.
4] The repo's are set to use Tuxedo repositories so updates come from there, they can be changed to Ubuntu's repo's but you proably wont get the control center and custom kernel updates.
5] Installing Tuxedo OS creates an extra Uefi boot entry in the bios list, its used for recovery on Tuxedo designed computers only and will not do anything on another brand of computer.
6] During installation the default setting for the installer is to use the entire drive, if you prefer a separate Home partition then you will need to choose 'something else' and create separate / and /home partitions but I find it best to use Gparted and create the efi/boot partition of around 500mb, a swap partition, root and home and use whats left over for a NTFS partition, that just my preference. Then go back to the installer and select those partitions. I use the same method when installing any version of Linux as it works best for me, other users will have their own methods.
7] after installing and upon reboot TuxedoOS messes with the pcspecialist's boot logo, its elongates its appearance just as it reboots, not sure why but be aware of it.
8] Changing the log in background is broken in this version, you will end up with either a odd semi transparent background or a black one.
The reason I tested Tuxedo was because it has a graphical display of the fan speeds, its using sensor I cant find in Linux in general so I presume its kernel based driver or some other method, it works or appears to but I cant probe the sensor it uses. So I went back to Mint 21.1 but if you want KDE then pick a distro with it, if its based on the latest Ubuntu and kernels from 5.15 to 6 it should work, kernel 5.15 will work out of the box. I have tested so far:
Mint 21.1 ( use it daily)
TuxedoOS2 ( meh )
Xubuntu
They all share the same Ubuntu base.
Laptop specs, almost off the shelf.
Chassis & Display Lafité Pro Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 60Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i5 12 Core Processor 1240P (1.7GHz, 4.4GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) 16GB PCS PRO SODIMM DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
1st M.2 SSD Drive 1TB SOLIDIGM P41+ GEN 4 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 4125MB/sR, 2950MB/sW)
Partitions: 1000GB
Memory Card Reader Integrated Micro-SD Memory Card Reader
AC Adaptor 1 x 90W AC Adaptor
Power Cable 1 x 1.5 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable
Battery Lafité Pro Series Integrated 73WH Lithium Ion Battery
Sound Card 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (2.4 Gbps) + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options 1 x THUNDERBOLT 4 + 1 x USB 3.2 (TYPE C) + 1 x USB 3.2 + 1 x USB 2.0
Keyboard Language LAFITÉ PRO 15 SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
(Edited to provide clarity regarding installing)
--
Mint 21.1 tested and installed with kernel 15 and worked as expected, WiFi, Ethernet and sound and Bluetooth worked out of the box.
To use the backlit keyboard use the same guide I wrote back in 2020 that's kindly stickied here, it works just fine and allows setting the keyboard light level, its colour and the F1 key to enable or disable the touch pad, use the provided 'colour selection' tool to obtain the colour code you want the backlight to be, this is found in the mint menu.
Virtualbox installs and works but if it doesn't, check in the bios that VT-D is enabled.
I have installed kernel Kernel Linux 6.0.0-1013-oem x86_64 to test and found while it does make a positive difference, it also throws a few errors about ignoring the driver for the tux-keyboard, everything still works just that on boot you may see a few pesky error messages, if I can solve those I will update this post.
I have also tested Tuxedo OS 2 on this laptop, its a very customised version of Xubuntu created for the German Tuxedo range of custom computers, it includes a custom kernel 6 and an in house control center and the custom keyboard control all located in the Tux control center. It used KDE as its desktop environment and while it works for the most part and is rather nice to use, it has a few bugs that I will list :
1] Root access has been removed in the recent KDE versions but can be added with a KDE plugin to allow root access to folders.
The GUI for the firewall needs some work, it requests the root password twice and can crash, a reboot solves it so if you enable the firewall, expect it to be a pain but it will come up as enabled on reboot.
2] For those of you who use Eddie VPN client, the icon in the panel doesnt scale very well, it look off but Eddie does work just fine.
3] There are some idiotic quirks with its version of 'KDEUSB boot disc creator' it seems locked to ubuntu ISO's and will not see its own tuxedo-os ISO, bit of a pain but you can use another boot usb disc tool.
4] The repo's are set to use Tuxedo repositories so updates come from there, they can be changed to Ubuntu's repo's but you proably wont get the control center and custom kernel updates.
5] Installing Tuxedo OS creates an extra Uefi boot entry in the bios list, its used for recovery on Tuxedo designed computers only and will not do anything on another brand of computer.
6] During installation the default setting for the installer is to use the entire drive, if you prefer a separate Home partition then you will need to choose 'something else' and create separate / and /home partitions but I find it best to use Gparted and create the efi/boot partition of around 500mb, a swap partition, root and home and use whats left over for a NTFS partition, that just my preference. Then go back to the installer and select those partitions. I use the same method when installing any version of Linux as it works best for me, other users will have their own methods.
7] after installing and upon reboot TuxedoOS messes with the pcspecialist's boot logo, its elongates its appearance just as it reboots, not sure why but be aware of it.
8] Changing the log in background is broken in this version, you will end up with either a odd semi transparent background or a black one.
The reason I tested Tuxedo was because it has a graphical display of the fan speeds, its using sensor I cant find in Linux in general so I presume its kernel based driver or some other method, it works or appears to but I cant probe the sensor it uses. So I went back to Mint 21.1 but if you want KDE then pick a distro with it, if its based on the latest Ubuntu and kernels from 5.15 to 6 it should work, kernel 5.15 will work out of the box. I have tested so far:
Mint 21.1 ( use it daily)
TuxedoOS2 ( meh )
Xubuntu
They all share the same Ubuntu base.
Laptop specs, almost off the shelf.
Chassis & Display Lafité Pro Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 60Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i5 12 Core Processor 1240P (1.7GHz, 4.4GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) 16GB PCS PRO SODIMM DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
1st M.2 SSD Drive 1TB SOLIDIGM P41+ GEN 4 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 4125MB/sR, 2950MB/sW)
Partitions: 1000GB
Memory Card Reader Integrated Micro-SD Memory Card Reader
AC Adaptor 1 x 90W AC Adaptor
Power Cable 1 x 1.5 Metre Cloverleaf UK Power Cable
Battery Lafité Pro Series Integrated 73WH Lithium Ion Battery
Sound Card 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (2.4 Gbps) + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options 1 x THUNDERBOLT 4 + 1 x USB 3.2 (TYPE C) + 1 x USB 3.2 + 1 x USB 2.0
Keyboard Language LAFITÉ PRO 15 SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
(Edited to provide clarity regarding installing)
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