Installing Wheezy on Thinkpad X130e

UEFI

The X130e does not want to boot via BIOS emulation. The Wheezy D-I installs only BIOS Grub. It does not provide the selection to use EFI at all. So the initial installation was BIOS only and EFI refused to boot it without an error. BIOS emulation simply don't want to work on the X130e.

Partman does not align partitions in GPT. For some reasons the partitions created by partman are not aligned in the partition table at all. This is bad for performance. Also it makes it impossible to create an EFI partition on it that is recognizable by Grub.

EFI Grub needs the EFI partition. This partition needs to be properly aligned and formatted with FAT16. It must be mounted on /boot/efi. Grub gets installed on this with the following commands:

apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
grub-install --bootloader-id=GRUB --removable

Grub

Grub fails to load EFI console stuff. Grub needs extra modules to allow the kernel to write on the console. Otherwise the kernel just hangs without output. This can be done via /boot/grub/custom.cfg to load them:

insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga

Radeon

The Radeon card needs a firmware. It just produces random output. To get a usable output, Radeon modeset must be disabled on the kernel command line:

radeon.modeset=0

Now the firmware can be installed:

apt-get install firmware-linux

Wireless card

The Broadcom wireless card needs a firmware:

apt-get install firmware-brcm80211