Ubuntu 24.10 Developer Preview Released For Snapdragon X1 Elite Laptops

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 15 October 2024 at 09:42 AM EDT. 20 Comments
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Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.10, today Canonical announced a developer preview of an Ubuntu 24.10 Linux build targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops.

As covered last month on Phoronix, Canonical engineers have been working on bringing up Snapdragon X1 Elite hardware with Ubuntu Linux. Now that most elements of the Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC support is upstream and in Linux 6.11~6.12 we have seen various DeviceTree files added for different Snapdragon X1 laptops, the upstream kernel support is coming together and making it easier for Linux distributions to support.

This Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview is targeted at early adopters and their ultimate hope is to provide an installation image that will "just work" on as many Snapdragon X1 Elite systems as possible. It may lead to a more generic ARM64 installer in the future but that is still a lofty goal with so many ARM consumer devices still depending upon Device Tree.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 has been the device seeing the most testing by Canonical and expected to work the best at this stage.

Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview for Snapdragon X1E


While there is now this Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview to ease the process of setting up Ubuntu Linux on modern Qualcomm-powered laptops, there are various feature limitations that remain. Additionally, necessary firmware files still cannot be easily redistributed by Ubuntu or other Linux distributions until they have been relicensed. So for now users need to hoop through the headache of having to fetch the firmware files from their Microsoft Windows installation for use under Linux.

More details on this new Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops via the Ubuntu Discourse.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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