Lenovo Yoga 530 is a rather inexpensive laptop computer. It transforms into a tablet, has a touchscreen and a stylus. I have its 14ARR variety, which runs on AMD CPU.

This article is a compilation of tips & tricks I found useful when running this device on Ubuntu.

Hardware Upgrade

(This section is not OS related just yet.)

• Stock configuration came to me with 8G RAM, which is insufficient

• According to a number of sources,

  • Lenovo website
  • Reddit thread

  the upgrade is only possible to 16G RAM total (not to 32G, which I would love to have).

The laptop comes with two 4G sticks in it, so you'll have to replace them both with 8G sticks to have 16G total.

WiFi

Out of the box, Ubuntu won't see the built in WiFi adapter (which happens to be RealTek RTL8821CE).

BIOS

Go to bios and turn off SecureBoot. It tends to turn it on again after BIOS upgrades.

Blacklist

Popular solution is to blacklist ideapad_laptop kernel module (like mentioned at this Lenovo forum thread), like this:

echo "blacklist ideapad_laptop" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_ideapad.conf

However it did not enable WiFi for me. (Though I am not certain it was not helpful together with the next point.)

What helped was this:

echo "blacklist 8821ce" >> /etc/modprobe.id/blacklist-ideapad.conf
sudo apt-get install rtl8821ce-dkms

WiFi connection turned on immediately.

Onscreen keyboard nastily appearing every time you touch the screen

This is enormously annoying, trust me. But:

sudo apt-get install chrome-gnome-shell

and this Gnome extension — voila, problem solved.

Some generic stuff not related to this laptop but I will write it anyway

Docker won't run without sudo

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
reboot

ElasticSearch won't run under Docker

...saying:

max virtual memory areas vm.max_map_count [65530] is too low, increase to at least [262144]

fix:

echo 'echo "vm.max_map_count=262144" >> /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf' | sudo bash
sudo service procps restart

As per this https://github.com/docker-library/elasticsearch/issues/111#issuecomment-268511769.

Issues not yet resolved

• When configured Caps Lock for switching keyboard layouts, the light indicator on the button itself won't work
• Keyboard is not disabled when laptop is laying on it