This post is designed for everyone who considers to buy a Lenovo IdeaPad Z370 and plans to install Ubuntu 11.04 on it.

The Z370 is a cheap (around 430€) , 13,3” wide screen laptop with an core I3 2nd generation CPU and 4 gig ram. About Ubuntu I don’t have say anything. On the other hand I have to mention the problems regarding laptop hardware support.

Long story short: There are problems, but none of them are serious.

Here is an overview of problems I’ve registered so far:

The special keys (volume up, down, mute) aren’t supportet. That wouldn’t be a problem, if a key press of one of these three keys wouldn’t evoke a crash on the unity or gnome pannels…

Another problem is the Ubuntu keyring. It seems to have problems to remember my ssh passphrases. I don’t know if this is a problem emerging only on Ubuntu + Z370 but, so far I have no solution for this problem.

Beside these problems, everything is fine. The Lenovo IdeaPad Z370 is a subnotebook, which is worth its salt. For an improved user experience you can add an SSD harddisk (which I did) and boot your laptop in roughly 15 to 18 seconds.

Update:

As mentioned in my later posts there a two additional problems with Ubuntu: The sd-card reader doesn’t work and the extra monitor is a little bit weird…