Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q Tiny

Image: Lenovo Corporation, fair use

This is a small but powerful computer that was very pleasant to set up. Also, the price was very attractive! And no assembly required, just unpack and plug it in.

• Lenovo cabinet + motherboard with 6xUSB3.1, 1xGigabit-ethernet, 2xDisplayPort, 1xIEEE802.11ac, 1xBluetooth4.1, an analog headphone jack, and an analog microphone jack.
• Dimensions: 17.9cm x 18.3cm x 3.45cm.
• Power supply: 65W. The power supply is an external brick, like in the first Mac mini generations.
• CPU: Intel Core i5-7400T (Kaby Lake) — four 2.4GHz cores (3GHz turbo), 4x64kB L1 cache, 4x256kB L2 cache, and one shared 6MB L3 cache. Thermal design 35W.
• RAM: 8GB Samsung 2400 MHz non-ECC SODIMM. It's a single stick, so only one of the two channels is used.
• Secondary storage: Samsung 128GB SSD model PM961, with an M.2 NVMe interface (MZVLW128HEGR).

The box came bundled with a keyboard and a mouse (both wired), which was a nice unexpected bonus considering the low price. It also came with Windows 10 Pro installed, which was not so nice since it means I probably paid some unnecessary Microsoft tax for that. But installing Linux was straightforward:

1. Press F1 at boot to enter BIOS.
2. Enable CSM (Compatibility Support Module) to allow "non-safe" boot from MBR devices.
3. Then change Boot mode from UEFI Only to Auto.
4. Insert an USB stick with the Linux installer (I used Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS server) and boot.

By choosing Entire Disk as the installation target, all Windows-related partitions are purged, so that's what I did. Installing Ubuntu was a breeze. The only thing that required some tinkering was making HDMI audio output work. This is what I did:

1. Do aplay -l to get a list of card numbers and device numbers.
2. Do speaker-test --channels 2 --rate 48000 --device hw:<CARD>,<DEV> for each combination of <CARD> and <DEV> that looks like it has something to do with HDMI, until you hear noise from the HDMI speakers.
3. In my case, this resulted in <CARD>=0 and <DEV>=8. Using that info I created the file ~/.asoundrc with the following content:

   pcm.!default {
     type hw
     card 0
     device 8
   }

   Adjust the card and device numbers according to whatever combination works for you.

Note: I never install pulseaudio on my machines, so I don't know if pulseaudio will complicate this. And I don't really care, actually.

Further note: Even when taking the HDMI audio configuration into account, the contrast is huge when compared to the total train wreck of an experience that I had with the Intel NUC two years ago.