Installing Fedora 14 on a ThinkPad W520

Video

The first decision is whether you want to use the NVidia discrete graphics (faster) or the Intel HD integrated graphics (more power-efficient). Both are more than fast enough for office graphics, the only noticeable speed difference is in 3D acceleration. You must set the graphics mode in the BIOS accordingly to discrete or integrated only. Do not leave it at the default "Optimus", as it is undocumented and unsupported.

NOTE!

If you want stable 3D acceleration out of the box you should use the Intel integrated graphics.

The following notes refer to the NVidia discrete graphics only. Fedora uses the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver in this case, which currently is restricted to 2D graphics. If you need 3D acceleration, you have to install the binary-only NVidia drivers. The easiest way is to configure teh RPM fusion repository and follow their NVidia HowTo. This amounts to running

# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# yum install kmod-nvidia

The backlight control does not work by default with the NVidia driver, to get it to work you have to add Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1" to the Device section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Networking

WiFi

I have the Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 card and it works out of the box.

Ethernet

The e1000e driver in Fedora 14 is too old for the ethernet chip. To get it to work you have to download and compile the updated driver from Intel's web page.