0

I have a Lenovo W510 and installed Ubuntu 12.04 onto it (64 bit).

The device is certified for Ubuntu:

However that certification page says, I should use a proprietary Nvidia driver:

Proprietary Drivers Required
Installation of proprietary NVidia video driver is required for full functionality.

Now I have trouble finding out which one exactly, the list offers more than one version.

With some tries, the first one which I managed to install was:

But the problem with that driver is that brightness controls are not working (the suggestion to edit xorg.conf did not help here).

So the question remains: Which proprietary Nvidia driver version does actually support brightness controls for Ubuntu 12.04 on Lenovo W510?

Improve this question
1
  • After trying diverse things, I've switched back to Fedora for that box and it pretty much works out of the box and very fine with the free (non-proprietary) drivers which are most likely the better option. It perhaps works as well with Ubuntu, one mistake I did was not wiring the 135W power adapter but a smaller one. I thought while in the docking station it makes no difference but I perhaps was wrong. I didn't test that against Ubuntu, I perhaps will do with the live disk.
    – hakre
    Feb 10, 2014 at 6:16

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

The problem is that drivers do not yet exist in the repo for 12.04 that support this product. Nvidia driver version 331.38 supports the Quadro FX 880M GPU as of January 27th, 2014. The driver for this product is only officially packaged for 14.04. You have four options to install this new driver, listed here in the order of recommendability:

Improve this answer
10
  • Thanks for your answer, I will try that hopefully within the next 48 hours.
    – hakre
    Jan 27, 2014 at 21:21
  • Do you know if an older version of that driver did support that card? I had brightness related problems with Fedora and proprietary Nvidia drivers in the very beginning when I bought this device but could handle it via commandline. Then this stopped working but Gnome did work then again. Then Gnoe got broken again but finally it worked again. So perhaps in that list of proprietary drivers I thought an older one might do it? Do you know anything in that direction?
    – hakre
    Jan 28, 2014 at 6:18
  • I have done the first two now. I'm not so sure what you've answered here is actually related to the exact graphics card nor tested. The first suggestion did just not work, the package does not exist with it when installed as outlined. The second does not work as well, the sources are broken and therefore the package doesn't exist at all. also it's hard to actually uninstall those suggestions, this doesn't work well neither. I now install from blob.
    – hakre
    Feb 1, 2014 at 10:16
  • Installing from blob did at least work as announced (it installs the driver). However the problem with brightness remains. So perhaps this was just guessed that 331.38 can handle brightness for Quadro FX 880M on W510? Could you please confirm decline? After getting it to run, I'll try now at least if enabling brightness control inside xorg conf file will do it.
    – hakre
    Feb 1, 2014 at 10:37
  • You really do not want both PPA's enabled. Please contact me in chat. I will be deleting this answer soon as it was apparently misleading.
    – Richard
    Feb 1, 2014 at 15:25

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .