Fedora 20 on the Portégé Z30

The last incarnation of the Z ultrabook-series is named Z30.
It has the same footprint as the previous Z830 and Z930, but has a different chassis and is slightly thicker.
To put it short - it's a really nice unit with both looks and power.
The new design is really attractive and as with every new generation, there are new components raising the bar for the combination of power vs energy consumption.

See some Z30-sku's here: http://www.toshiba.eu/laptops/portege/portege-z30-a/

In the unit currently in my lap we have the following stuff:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4500
Chipset : Intel HM86 Chipset
GPU: Intel 4400
8GB DDR3L 1600 memory
Primary storage: 256GB SSD
Wireless: Intel Wilkins peak 1 (802.11 ac + agn) including Bluetooth 4

Other highlights are a backlit keyboard, SD-host, 3 USB3 ports, an HDMI-out port along with a VGA-port.
It also has a built-in port for a system docker - something which was not available in the earlier Z-series.

As to be expected, everything feels solid, well built and sturdy.
My personal opinion is that unit could have been a bit heavier...

So how does the combination Z30 and Fedora work?
Well, I have come to understand that Intel components tend to run very well under Linux.
Also as with the B2B models from Toshiba, they tend to work well under Linux.
So also in this case.
All devices worked apart from the backlight-control.
However this was easily fixed.

Booting, running and installing Fedora 20 on the unit on worked fine and both mice (touchpad and trackpoint) works perfect.
As mentioned above, the backlight was not possible to control by FN + F6 / F7.
It's easy to find solutions for this and once implemented, it works great.

The solution is to add a kernel argument in GRUB2 at boot time.
GRUB2 is the bootloader used by many distributions.

What need to be done is to add the following argument which fixes the non-working backlight control

acpi_backlight=vendor

to the end of the current GRUB commandline found in the file 

/etc/default/grub

And then we need to ask GRUB2 to incorporate our changes to the current boot-menu.

Now, I am assuming you are a "sudo'er" - means you're in the sudo-group which lets you do administrative tasks by use of sudo.
I like the feature a lot and it actually helps if GUI based programs are needed to be run as root.

If you are not in the sudo'ers group here's a guide to fix this:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Configuring_Sudo


Ok, so assuming you're a sudo'er and prefer working in a GUI - open the terminal (yes, that's true).
In the terminal enter:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

You'll be prompted with a request for your sudo-password.
Enter it and gedit should start looking like the below:

 

Don't be confused or intimidated by the content of the file. Just look for the line starting with 

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=

Now find the end of that line and make sure there's a space between the last arguments and this which you should add:

acpi_backlight=vendor

You should have something like the below:

Don't forget that the line need to end with "

Once done, save and exit. If you want to do it my way, press CTRL+S and then ALT+F4.
Now stay in the terminal and write the following command:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

This will add your change to the current boot-menu.
You should see something like:

Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.6-200.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.13.6-200.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-7edae5ea237e4249ad70613908f4c1b3
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-7edae5ea237e4249ad70613908f4c1b3.img
done

Now you should be able to reboot your unit and test the backlight with the help of FN+F6/F7.

Finally, see below for an overview of the tests and results running F20 on the Z30.

BR Tom

	Cold booted	Resumed from Standby
Hardware features
Full native resolution on display	OK	OK
SD host	OK	OK
WLAN	OK	OK
Bluetooth	OK	OK
LAN	OK	OK
Touchpad	OK	OK
Mic	OK	OK
Sound	OK	OK
HDMI-out	OK	OK
HDMI sound	OK	OK
Webcam	OK	OK
Hotkeys
Instant lock FN + F1	Ok	OK
Power meter – FN + F2	OK	OK
Standby – FN + F3	OK	OK
Hibernation – FN +F4	Ok	Ok
Display change - FN + F5	OK*	OK*
Brightness - FN + F6 / F7	OK	Ok
Radio On/Off - FN + F8	OK	OK
Touchpad On/Off - FN + F9	NG	NG
Volume control - FN + 3 / 4	OK	OK
Mute On/Off - FN + ESC	OK	OK
Keyboard backlight	Ok	OK