Optimus on Thinkpad W541

[josh5k]

I'm trying my hand at Linux on the W541 and dual booting between Win 10 and Debian. Should I be disabling the Nvidia card in BIOS (Can I?) before trying to install Linux on it?

All the information I see online is unclear esp on the Core 4th Gen chipsets and Quadro Support on Linux seems iffy at best.

This machine has the K1100M and is already running quite hot on Windows 10 and I'm concerned that Graphics driver issues might either results in instability or overheating.

How stable is bumblebee for production environment? https://www.pcsuggest.com/install-and-c ... in-debian/

Using this link as the general guide and going ahead with the install today - https://mbogochow.wordpress.com/2015/07 ... kpad-w541/

[josh5k]

The Optimus drivers still aren't working. Tried the direct download from Nvidia the latest of which did not list the K1100M on the supported devices.

There was a driver from 2013 that did list the K1100M, but that did not work either.

Using the machine with just the Intel Graphics for now.

[m11k]

I recently got optimus working on my W530, so I suspect the process is basically the same. Things have gotten much better over the last year, and it basically just works out of the box on Debian 11 ("Bullseye"). Yes, that is the unreleased testing version, but I assure you it is quite stable. Just install Debian using the debian testing installer: https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/.

A good reference is this page: https://wiki.debian.org/NVIDIA%20Optimus

Don't install the nvidia driver binary that nvidia offers for download on their site. Use Debian's packaged version instead in the non-free repo.

After a stock install of Debian, I all I did was:

1. edit /etc/apt/sources.list, add contrib and non-free
2. apt update
3. apt install nvidia-driver
4. apt install mesa-utils

After that I made a script in my home directory named 'nv-run.sh', which looked like:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
env __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia "$@"

You can simply launch a binary with nv-run.sh as a wrapper, and it will use the nvidia gpu instead of the intel gpu.

My notes on installing wine and playonlinux are out of date (from 4 months ago), and are unnecessarily complicated because of an i386 dependency problem that I think has been resolved. I would try the following:
1. dpkg --add-architecture i386
2. apt update
3. apt install wine wine32 wine64
4. apt install playonlinux

Hopefully Debian has fixed the issue I ran into and that command just works. When I did it, I needed to run:
1. apt install wine wine32 wine64 --no-install-recommends
2. apt install playonlinux
3. manually install libllvm10 i386 and amd64 from unstable because of version conflicts
(I noticed that this package no longer exists, and my W530 now has libllvm11 installed -- so I'm guessing the issue I had has been resolved)
4. apt install nvidia-driver-libs:i386
5. apt install libasound2-plugins:i386
6. apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-base:i386 gstreamer1.0-plugins-good:i386

Like I said, hopefully wine and playonlinux just apt installs correctly now. And I made a note about seeing debian bug #929521.

[josh5k]

Thank you @m11k - Missed your post and installed Parrot OS instead. I'm obviously not committed to a single OS beyond a week

I'm running off the Intel chip for now. But I can try your steps on this install and see if it works (based off Buster).

Edit: Ran the quite simple commands and got the Nvidia card working now (not Optimus). Only difference was, since this is the K1100M, I had to install the Legacy 390XX drivers instead of the current package. I think I'll stay off Optimus for now and stick to the dedicated card and observe temperatures and battery life.

[m11k]

Debian's Nvidia drivers are at version 460, and they work with my W530 w/ a K2000M. The K1100M in your W541 is a newer card than the K2000M, so they should also be compatible with your system.

I recall that Debian's nvidia driver check told me that the K2000M wasn't compatible and that I needed to run the legacy drivers, but I installed the current drivers anyway and they work fine. NVidia officially supports the K2000 in their release notes (but not the K2000M for some reason). I've had no issues. The desktop is stable, and I can run unigine heaven, so 3d acceleration is working. Since Debian 11 (bullseye) is in freeze right now before release, the drivers won't see another major version upgrade in this release. So fortunately I'll be able to continue running Debian 11 on this system without fear of losing support for graphics drivers.