Maverick on T520 with optimus, first impressions

I just got my new dev box, a Lenovo T520 with the FHD screen, an i5, and optimus card.

Lucid is missing out-of-the-box TRIM support, and Natty is too fresh for my kind of work, so I went with Maverick 64.

The first thing I did was put in a Mushkin Callisto Deluxe SSD and a second 4GB DIMM. Then I switched to integrated graphics in the BIOS.

The machine recognized the second DIMM and tried to boot into several live CDs but only got as far as stack traces and panics. The DIMM came direct from Crucial, supposedly compatible with the T520.

Without the faulty DIMM, The live CD booted just fine, with wireless, etc, and at full resolution. I checked "Download updates while installing" (my internet is pretty weak).

After restarting though, the system doesn't boot, somewhere trying to start X. So I switched to discrete graphics in the BIOS, and sure enough, it boots.

It boots without sound, touchpad, or wireless, that is, and at 640x800.

Fortunately, after a sudo apt-get update over ethernet, the sound, touchpad, and wireless came back. (I needed more than 300MB in archives: why does Ubuntu do such an incomplete update during installation?)

Ubuntu didn't offer proprietary graphics drivers, so I installed the nvidia drivers according to this tutorial
Alain Kelder is a Giant Dork…

This step gave me the nvidia settings tool. As far as power management, it offers only two levels of adaptive scaling, but at the high level the clock rates are all 2-3X what they are at the low level.

I installed the compiz settings tool and imported my config. I found that none of the compiz effects I use caused the GPU to scale up.

When installing the nvidia driver, I let it edit my xorg.conf. I didn't try the integrated graphics in the BIOS between updating the system and installing the nvidia driver, but of course now X will not start with integrated selected. Which is why I got the 9 cell battery

Suspend works. Hibernate doesn't (I used a swap partition since I'm short RAM). Volume hotkeys work. Brightness hotkeys don't.

My BIOS revision was one point off and I made a big mistake looking at the changelog for the latest BIOS. It mentioned fixing something about the Fn-F7 hotkey in vista. Well I tried that combo, and let me tell you, it is for sure broken in Maverick. All it did at first was freeze the machine.

But then I upgraded to the latest BIOS and tried the brightness hotkeys, to see if they were fixed. And that froze the machine. Well it didn't just freeze it... it caused some semi-persistent kind of bug that prevented X from starting. I'm not sure how I got X to start but it involved a lot of power cycling with the battery off

Some googling showed that there may be a regression in Ubuntu or the nvidia driver that is affecting the Lenovo brightness controls. Anyhow, it's pretty seriously obnoxious and points to poor engineering somewhere in the mix. Nothing this stupidly trivial should cause such dramatic failure.

Somehow Ubuntu enabled GRUB even though it's my only OS. Strangely there's no timeout on my GRUB so it just sits there. And it doesn't come up every time either, some sometimes. Weird.

Everything else is just dandy. The screen is beautiful. The keyboard is great. The body feels good. The SSD benches where it ought to (I used this guide to enable TRIM- https://sites.google.com/site/lightrush/random-1/howtoconfigureext4toenabletrimforssdsonubuntu ). My test suites fly. Ubuntu is still a great platform.

I'll post an update on battery life, stability, etc..

 

It is likely that the stuff isn't supported 'out of the box' and you have to apt-get update it because it is new hardware and isn't completely supported yet. Since you are having trouble with x that would make me think that something isn't completely supported in the hardware.

The reason X was running at 640x480 after you switched graphics cards is because it wasn't expecting that particular piece of hardware. It's sort of a fail safe mode until it got the correct driver and was configured for so.

Likely hibernate is not working because there is some hardware device that isn't 100% compatible or you are missing a driver for something.

 

I ended up reverting to Lucid Lynx, and have perfect stability. My SSD is sandforce and continues to bench well even without TRIM. Also I got a second 4GB DIMM (g.skill from newegg) and it works great.