Category:W510

Linux Installation

As of 2010-02-14 the following problems exist with the W510 under Linux:

• Suspend not implemented yet in USB 3.0 (xhci) driver - system cannot suspend unless driver is unloaded first
• nVidia FX 880M with any current release driver will show a "fuzzy screen" after a console switch or logout/login - fixed in 195.36.03 beta, but graphics still suffers freezes. 195.36.08 seems to work perfectly - no freezes, no fuzzy screen.
• Resume results in corrupted display objects with kernel < 2.6.33 and/or driver less than 195.36.03
• System can only resume from sleep once - acpi related kernel crash occurs on resume (but system continues to operate), next resume shows BIOS screen and hangs
• Audio intermittent (citation needed--I have no audio problems. -User_talk:Quinxex) Audio on my W510 has been "destroyed" after running Ubuntu for a while. T510 users have been reporting the same problem - audio stops working at some point and never works again.
• No support for display brightness controls when using binary video driver
• Wired networking stuck at 10Mbit without manual change using ethtool. For Ubuntu Karmic this can easily be fixed by manually downloading and installing the e1000e driver from Intel.
• Archlinux cannot easily be configured, as the wireless and ethernet cards both require drivers that are not present in the 2009.08 release. (This may be a problem for other distros, as well.)

Workarounds:

• On Ubuntu Karmic, Wireless can be enabled by installing linux-backport-modules-karmic. This adds missing firmware for 6000-series cards.
• All Versions: System cannot suspend unless SUSPEND_MODULES="xhci" is added to /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules (may need to create this file) Note that this does not resolve the "crash on second resume" problem.
• To change the brightness, one can switch to a virtual console and change it there, and the new brightness will remain when resuming X usage.
• On archlinux, ethernet will work after one manually installs the newest kernel26 package, while wifi requires the appropriate microcode package, iwlwifi-6000-ucode.
• The Nouveau open source nVidia driver is said to work at full resolution without freezing (but without 3D acceleration). This driver is included in Ubuntu Lucid alphas.

Hardware notes

• The W510 ships with a large (nearly doubled size of the old 90W) 135W power supply. However, it is possible to plug old (90W) power supplies, but they get rather warm. Upon boot there's a notification message, that a power supply with reduced performance is connected.