Lenovo W520 owners & Linux

Information for this notebook coupled with Linux seems to be a little scarce, so I'm hoping we can get some interesting tidbits and tips going here in this thread.

For the most part Slackware installed fine and everything looks to be working "out of the box", except one thing for me and that is the reading of the CPU temperature sensor. Currently running kernel 2.6.39.2 and I believe under /sys/devices/platform/thinkpad_hwmon there should be some listings that correspond to temps, but on my system there are none.

 

forum.thinkpads.com • View forum - Linux Questions

maybe you would get a better chance of finding the answer from the above forum in relation to linux.

 

What's the best distro these days? Why slackware?

 

^^^ Best distro? Any distro is the best. Any release of any distro is the best. A Linux enthusiast's current obsession is the best.

 

A copy of my post from the massive owner's thread

dimm0k:

You should be able to get the temperatures using lm-sensors and the xsensors frontend to it. I don't have a W520 yet, but here is how to would set up lm-sensors:

1. Install lm-sensors (could also be called lm_sensors). It should be either in the repository or on the SlackBuilds website.

2. Run sensors-detect as root. Just answer yes to all the questions.

3. When sensors-detect finishes, it will give you a list of kernel modules you need to load. For my computer (not W520), the modules were coretemp and sbs. To load them, you would run, as root:

Code:

#replace with your modules
modprobe coretemp
modprobe sbs

If you want them to load at boot, just type in the modules in /etc/modules (one module per line).

4. Now, just run xsensors and it should give you your motherboard/hard drive/CPU/etc temperatures.

 

thinkwiki is the best place to share info about linux on Thinkpads. Of course it depends on people updating it when they have new hardware....

 

I'm all for what Lead_Org just asked.....

Renee

 

There has been some progress with Optimus offloading: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee

 

Confirmation that it works.
I am running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit with kernel 2.6.38-8-generic on my W520 and using GNOME HW Sensor Applet 2.2.7, installed the package sensor-applet direct from Synaptic, here the direct link to GNOME Sensors Applet Homepage.
I am planing to upgrade to 2.6.39 kernel this weekend (in the hope to get the IntelHD 3000 GPU to work with external monitors) and will report back if the CPU sensoring is still working. On attached thumbnail you can see the t° running 2 VMWare VM with 7GB RAM and 3 FF instances, one of them running YouTube videos (aka our much beloved Flash ;-)).
At the moment, if I run only on integrated GPU, I cannot connect to external monitores, neither from VGA nor from DispayPort nor from docking station. There are reports that the support for integrated IntelHD 3000 GPU is much better in the kernel 2.6.39, that I would like to test.
Interesting is that also under W7 I cannot connect to external monitor attached to my docking station via VGA port but do not have time to investigate that since working primarly under Linux.

 

----in the hope to get the IntelHD 3000 GPU to work with external monitors --- i tried it with 2.6.39-gentoo-r1 -- no change --- i think its a hardware-issue -- only with nvidia

http://thinkpad-forum.de/threads/117569-W520-Integrierte-Grafik-Display-Port-externer-Monitor

 

I think only the digital outputs are physically wired to the nVidia card. Not sure about VGA though.

 

My reason for Slackware is because I wanted to learn Linux from the ground up. Learning how to do things at its most basic level, the command line, allows me to hopefully apply what I've learned in Slackware across any other distros I may encounter. The other distros these days seem to cater to people who want to use Linux at some level without the need or want to learn it.

To some degree it is... The information provided there for when I had my W510 was useful and that was when the W510 first came out. If you look at the info for the W520, it's very basic with nothing too detailed.

Have you had a chance to try this on the W520?

 

Thanks chenxiaolong and wolfindersteppe for giving me hope! Under kernel 2.6.39.2 I believe I did run sensors-detect to probe and the result was that it could not find any modules for me to use. Will have to re-confirm under 2.6.39.2 with sensors-detect again, as well as maybe an earlier kernel to see if anything has changed.

I do remember having some issues with 1.24/25 that involved ACPI not working properly in Linux, which was the reason I went to 1.22. This was also mentioned on someone's blog, but no specifics mentioned as to what exactly wasn't working other than the above mentioned statement. Hopefully the next BIOS will fix this issue...

wolfindersteppe, which BIOS version are you currently using? I'm going to give Ubuntu a shot tonight to see if I can get the sensors recognized on my machine first and then work my way on through that.

chenxiaolong, what distro are you running?

 

dimm0k: I'm currently running Debian sid/unstable with kernel 3.0-rc5 and also Arch Linux with kernel 2.6.29.

 

My first slackware experience was in 1995 I think.

 

I installed sensors-applet under a Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit Live CD, but am not able to get the same display as you. At most I can get the HDD temp and only one other temp, which looks like it might be the CPU? What temps are you able to pull off because in your screenshot there's a total of 6 readings!

Also wonder what BIOS version you have and if the one I'm using, 1.22, is missing some readings that would give me what you see on yours.

 

I got a raid 1 setup. I have hard time to install ubuntu 11.04 64 bit. It just won't boot the ubuntu.