Debian 8 on the Lenovo Ideapad S206

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

The Linux Laptop Wiki has a page about the Lenovo Ideapad S206; the quick summary is that everything works with only a little tweaking.

I got my dad a Lenovo Yoga 300 a few days ago, and installed Debian 8 on his old Ideapad S206 before giving it to Ammu, who has been using my old (and increasingly broken) Thinkpad X120e for months now. This is a brief, unexciting summary of installing Debian 8 on the S206.

Wifi worked out of the box with brcmsmac. Bluetooth worked fine after installing the firmware-atheros package. Sound input and output worked fine out of the box. The hotkeys to change the volume (and brightness, etc.) also worked. I didn't try the card reader or the webcam.

I didn't bother with the fglrx video drivers, but I had to install firmware-linux-nonfree to enable KMS (kernel mode setting) to get suspend/resume to work properly. (Hibernation worked fine anyway.)

This is a sleek and light machine, quite a step up from the earlier Ideapad models I've used. The screen is a bit shiny, but stops short of being annoying. The keypad is unfortunately very jittery—unless you are very deliberate about tapping-to-click, you'll most likely just move the pointer a bit rather than clicking. This was my father's biggest problem with the machine (and it wasn't just a matter of acceleration settings).

But it's working nicely otherwise, and I hope Ammu gets some good use out of it.