Clevo P377SM-A with 980M + Linux Mint 17.1

Much to my amazement, this machine works great with Linux.

There is really only one major annoyance... I can not adjust my LCD brightness.

SLI has never worked for mobile cards so I'm not so upset about that.

On the install, I had to edit the boot options and add nomodeset in order to avoid it freezing when it loaded nouveau but I have it installed in EFI mode alongside Windows 8.1 so I can use both.

Here's Heaven running on it.

Spoiler

I'll probably have to move to MATE so that I can have my thermal sensors though. Doesn't seem like Cinnamon has any dockable ones.

 

Did you try acpi_backlight=vendor as a kernel parameter?

 

Its highly unlikely it will work. It doesn't even work in Windows without the proper Clevo Hotkey software interfacing with the EC. When I hit the FN keys, it shows the brightness indicator going up and down but has no effect.

I also don't believe the nVidia drivers are recognizing that my display is 120hz.

While running the UE4 benchmarks on Phoronix yesterday, it froze the system and the caps lock and number lock were flashing before it rebooted itself so something went wrong but I have no idea what it was.

 

That's a good sign that the brightness keys work - I'd give it a shot!

 

To adjust screen brightness:

apt-get install xbacklight

~$ xbacklight --help
usage: xbacklight [options]
where options are:
-display <display> or -d <display>
-help
-set <percentage> or = <percentage>
-inc <percentage> or + <percentage>
-dec <percentage> or - <percentage>
-get
-time <fade time in milliseconds>
-steps <number of steps in fade>

 

There's a CPU Temperature Indicator for Cinnamon.

 

I have a P750DM, I'm running Fedora 22 XFCE but you can probably adapt this to get it to work for you. I used exactly what the arch page said and it works for me. I'm using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and I have a Quadro M5000M but as soon as I installed the NVIDIA driver it recognized the screen correctly, before the NVIDIA drivers it was driving at 88Hz.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backlight

install xbacklight
install inotify-tools

make this file

/usr/local/bin/xbacklightmon

#!/bin/bash
max=/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness
level=/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/actual_brightness
factor=$(awk '{print $1/100}' <<< $(<$max))

xblevel() { awk '{print int($1/$2)}' <<< "$(<$level) $factor"; }
xbacklight -set $(xblevel)
inotifywait -m -qe modify $level | while read -r file event; do
xbacklight -set $(xblevel)
done


I set xbacklightmon to launch on startup so that it's always running.

I'm using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and I have a Quadro M5000M but as soon as I installed the NVIDIA driver it recognized the screen correctly, before the NVIDIA drivers it was driving at 88Hz.

 

@Ethrem , do you still have linux around,today on 1st go with ubuntu 16.04 and nvidia drivers 361.18, kernel 4.3.0-5-generic EFI mode i have backlight working with no further mods that i'm aware of (unless there happens to be some post script which runs).Clevo p750dmg-970m.I plan to try older releases of kernel plus drivers to see where the change took place.

 

I haven't tried it lately but 17.2 would not work at all, no matter what switches I tried. Nouveau is a really big hassle and for some reason nothing was overriding the faulty mode settings causing the LCD to go out of range.

I plan to try Kubuntu when I'm done with the series I'm watching on Hulu, kind of want to check out KDE Pulse so I'll let you know.

 

Whatever they broke in 17.2 they fixed in 17.3 - booted with --nomodeset, installed, enabled driver for nVidia. Voila.

 

Great news,is your brightness good as well?

 

I had to install xbacklight and just adjust it manually but it's better than nothing.