The thing with ThinkPad W520 is (and I'd be extremely glad if I had a chance during this lifetime, to congratulate the smarty pants that thought this up) that unfortunately, the Intel Sandybridge GPU IS NOT WIRED (?!?) to any of the external ports and vice-versa, the nVidia Quadro, whichever model, can only send directly to LCD if in discrete mode (which is almost kind of logical, if you conform to the brainfart that "Intel owns the LCD channel").
So... no cigar. I was so pissed off when I realised it. Especially since it was forced upon me to realise it one day before a course I was supposed to deliver (on overhead projector, of course) had started. Which is good, in a way, because anger can be a good motivator.
So, basically, until I (or someone else) find(s) something out, this goes for Lenovo ThinkPad W520:
1. INTERNAL-ONLY MODE
No external port will ever work. VGA1 output appears in xrandr (the others don't), but it can't be turned on. Intel i965 DRM works quite decently for every day work (although there is a trick with GLX cut-off, so don't trust glxgears). The bummer is the fact you can completely forget any kind of external display devices except perhaps streaming your LCD flicks somewhere with a digital camera attached to a network switch.
2. DISCRETE-ONLY MODE
You will get everything you're used to with a "normal" graphics card (that Quadro is), but no Intel. IF it works, it means higher performance and power consumption, but who cares - for me at least, it's function and performance first with this beast, only then autonomy. If, as I might have forgotten to point out, it boots, nvidia-settings performs exactly how one would expect it to, detects monitors properly, TwinView works, in short, you get the lot, although mode switches are a bit sluggish to my taste.
If.
Various users reported various degrees of success, ranging from once out of three down to straight never, for me though it was one successful boot in about 25 attempts, which is great if I had a boss. Because then, whenever that boss would have been giving me a hard time in the morning, I could simply demonstrate to them that my laptop won't boot, so they should bugger off until I fixed it.
Still looking into what exactly causes it, because even when booting without KMS, the damn thing will freeze immediately after, f.e. plymouth had been started on Fedora 16. With KMS, it will have *always* frozen immediately after the nvidia.ko module has been loaded.
3. OPTIMUS
This is currently my best (and only) bet, actually.
You get best of both worlds - a neutered on-chip Intel GPU for best battery consumption and a crippled Quadro GPU that can't touch your LCD for whenever you want to do high-performance graphics. This is exactly the reason why Chelmite could not see anything with nvidia drivers in Optimus - they were displaying on the external port. And, no - even if you start up nvidia-settings from the external display, you *still* can't touch your LCD. Looking forward to whatever Bumblebee and Ironhide have to offer. This is going to be one hell of a night.
P.S.: For random readers' amusement's sake...
On the first day of the course, I "solved" the overhead problem by running Intel in Optimus, tried a bit of hand waving and then attached the main display of a workstation nobody was using to the projector, ssh-tunnelled port 5900 from the workstation to my laptop's loopback. I then started up a read-only vncviewer on the workstation in order to display what was going on in the virtual machine I had set up for the course.
Today, I rebooted about ninety-five times, developed a couple of grey hairs and then started up with nvidia in Optimus, on the external port only, of course. I proceeded to creating a new user account to prevent my desktop from being slaughtered by the micro resolution of the overhead, attached the projector to the external VGA port and was luckily able to mirror that over back to my table where an LCD was situated - because the projector has a VGA OUT port.
*sigh*
Today's laptop designers really must be bored to the point of committing suicide by sucking up five bottles of orange juice up their rectae and waiting for it to eat its way through, thereby causing their guts to fall out of their arse. They then rather opt for upping their spirits by collecting snapshots of facial expressions of customers when they realise what a crappy product they have bought. I have no other reasonable explanation for a design like this.
P.P.S: Oh, I almost forgot adding this one horrendously impractical, but functional workaround which I came across for my most acute case, the course - in Optimus, you can start your primary display on Intel, for example, create a *separate* xorg.conf for nVidia (and, obviously, without any pointing devices as you can't realistically expect to be able to look in a different direction with each of the eyes, just to be able to constantly check you're not wreaking havoc on the other display with your clicking and typing) and then start up on external display like this:
$ X -sharevts -novtswitch -config hw/nvidia-force1152.conf :1
After it started up, you can simply start the read-only vncviewer over there like so:
$ env DISPLAY=:1 vncviewer -FullScreen=1 -ViewOnly=1 -UseLocalCursor=1 localhost:0
Of course, this only akin to "works" for presentations inside a virtual machine accessible using VNC or mirroring your own display that you previously configured to allow remote access.
Topic: Fedora 16 for NVIDIA Optimus users (Read 12832 times)