Lenovo B560 (Optimus, Nvidia 310M)

[datatek]

Hello all,

I am running Fedora 14 on a Lenovo B560 laptop.
This laptop has a hardware peculiarity, namely Nvidia's newest gag: Optimus.
This laptop has two graphics cards: an Intel GMA HD (for 2D) and a Nvidia 310 M (for 3D). The Optimus technology automatically activates the graphics card required for the current task.

Now, Optimus on linux is so far officially unsupported by Nvidia.

At the moment, my Fedora runs on the Intel GMA. I personally don't care if Optimus doesn't run on linux if I can somehow manually (even solely) use the Nvidia 310M graphics card.

So far, all my manual attempts in xorg.conf to speak to this card fail with the X not starting and the well-known "Screen not found" error.

Does anyone have any experience with this or ideas how to activate the Nvidia card?

Thank you in advance.

D

[swaroop933]

Hi,

I have the same problem.. All my attempts to install NVIDIA drivers on Lenovo B560 failed... Need help...

[Dan]

Hmmmm.

No experience with this yet, but most of the laptops I'm looking have it. Is there a setting in the BIOS to select one or the other?

[datatek]

Unfortunately no.

[swaroop933]

Hi, I checked the BIOS, there is selection of Graphics card in it but it has only two option, Optimus and IGD(may be it stands for Intel Graphics Card). I chose Optimus and by default, I suppose it is Optimus. I saved the configuration and started my Linux and tried to install drivers again but still I am not able to install..

Help..........

[leigh123linux]

Hi, I checked the BIOS, there is selection of Graphics card in it but it has only two option, Optimus and IGD(may be it stands for Intel Graphics Card). I chose Optimus and by default, I suppose it is Optimus. I saved the configuration and started my Linux and tried to install drivers again but still I am not able to install..

Help..........

Third option,

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=162171

[benko]

I have a B560 in front of me as we speak, so if anybody is still interested, I'm trying out the following (I use this for presentations since IGD has no access to external display ports):

- configuring the laptop in Optimus mode

- a NVidia proprietary driver installation (would work with "nv" just as well, so this step is optional)

- a custom configuration file in /etc/X11/hw/second-display.conf

- starting Xorg like this:
$ X -sharevts -novtswitch -config hw/second-display.conf :1

- enabling remote connections on primary display ("Desktop Sharing Preferences" in Gnome 3)

- running a vncviewer on the external display, looping back to primary display
$ env DISPLAY=:1 vncviewer -FullScreen=1 -ViewOnly=1 -UseLocalCursor=1 localhost:0

I'll let you know how it works out and post details here in a couple of hours. On ThinkPad W520 it works wonderfully.
--
benko

[benko]

Heh, I was surprised to see yesterday, there is nothing that needs be done.

In Gnome 3, you start the laptop on IGD, plug in the VGA cable, POINK. External monitor is there, managed by XRandr, everything works like a charm. So I just went into BIOS and disabled Optimus.