Installing CentOS 8 on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1

Installing CentOS 8 onto the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 (first generation) is pretty straight forward. Here are a couple of things to consider after installation:

#1 Bluetooth firmware. The bluetooth connection will keep crashing if you do not install the specific firmware. It is not included in the default OS.
cd /lib/firmware/brcm
wget https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware/raw/master/brcm/BCM20702A1-0a5c-21e6.hcd

#2 Enable TPM in the bios if you receive TPM messages

#3 If you need the Thinkpad DisplayLink dock, follow the instructions here.

Items confirmed working:

  • Finger print sensor
  • WLAN
  • Bluetooth
  • USB
  • Sound
  • Internal Screen
  • DisplayLink dock
  • Tactical buttons
  • Secondary buttons
  • Touchpad incl. gestures
  • Trackpoint
  • Camera
Items not working 100%:
  • When you use the DisplayLink dock, the mouse curser sometimes shows a trail and jumps.
  • LED light on the Microphone button