[wplug] Video issues on Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with Fedora 23

G.Pitman gpitman at gmail.com
Thu Jun 16 08:21:49 EDT 2016


Can you disable optimus in the bios?

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 8:09 PM, Pat Barron <pat at lectroid.com> wrote:

> So, I have installed Fedora Workstation 23 on a Thinkpad W520, using the
> Fedora 23 network install image.  The install worked fine, all went as
> expected.  During the install, I set up a disk encryption password, 'cause
> that is what I'm supposed to do on laptops at the office.  There were no
> problems with any of this, and after downloading all the RPMs and
> installing them, Fedora 23 was (apparently) ready to go.
>
> Then, I rebooted the laptop to start the newly installed system, GRUB came
> up, did the normal countdown, and then booted the kernel.
>
> And then the screen went dark, and it just sat there...
>
> On a hunch, while it was sitting there, I typed the hard drive encryption
> password "blind" (without being able to see what was going on), and hit
> ENTER.  Lo and behold, the hard drive light started flashing (the screen is
> still totally dark at this point), and shortly thereafter, the screen came
> on and showed the GNOME display manager, and I could log in.
>
> On another hunch, I shut down the machine, rebooted it, and when GRUB came
> up, typed 'e' to edit the GRUB boot configuration.  At the end of the
> options to the kernel, I added "nomodeset", and let it boot.  This time, it
> displayed the prompt for the hard drive encryption password.  I typed it,
> the kernel started to boot, and I could see the normal kernel boot messages
> coming up on the screen, and then the Fedora boot "progress bar" was
> displayed. Then it started the display manager, and I could log in - but
> the display was all weird, distorted and stretched.  I don't want to use it
> like that.
>
> After some searching around, it seems that whatever is going on has
> something to do with the fact that the W520 has two graphics adapter - a
> sort of "normal" Intel integrated graphics controller, and an NVIDIA GF108
> discrete graphics controller.  I think that is confusing GRUB - though at
> least GNOME and/or Xorg knows how to deal with it, so things are OK once
> the desktop is running. Searching on the web led me to an understanding (at
> least partially) of the problem - but I didn't find anything that seemed to
> be a solution of any kind...
>
> Is there any reasonable way to make this work better?  I mean, I guess I
> can just type the disk encryption password "blind" (since I know what it's
> expecting), and if there are any problems with booting at any point, I can
> boot with the "nomodeset" option so I can then see the kernel messages and
> such.  But it would be nice if it actually worked the way it was supposed
> to, all the time. ;-)
>
> --Pat.
>
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