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I recently bought a Lenovo Y510P which comes with a SLI of NVIDIA GT750M.

I managed to install Ubuntu 13.04 on my UEFI system by simply downloading the correct .iso, disabling secure boot and removing my second graphics card from the ultrabay. So, Ubuntu has installed itself with nouveau drivers, since it's using the integrated Intel HD4600, which can't be disabled or enabled by the BIOS. Since here, everything's fine, I can boot into lightdm and work.

Now I want to use my full SLI configuration, or at least I don't want to physically remove my second graphics card from the laptop, so I installed the nvidia-current package from the repository.

Now the system freezes after this kernel message

* Starting LightDM Display Manager [OK]

And I can't even switch to tty1 to 12.

I tried removing quiet splash from the boot entry, adding nomodeset=1 but nothing changed.

Is there any way to get it to work?

landroni
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hjeldin
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    Have you tried installing nvidia-319? Also I'd suggest that you consider the Bumblebee approach: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee (I have the same laptop but with only one graphics card and I've been pretty satisfied using Bumblebee so far.) – Anton Petrov Nov 01 '13 at 16:33
  • Last March, After several weeks of different combinations of video drivers, I managed to get both nvidia graphics cards on my Y510P to show up in Ubuntu 14.04. Since then I switched back to Windows so I don't remember the exact driver version I used, but I think it may have been 304.xxx. The important thing is, at the time I thought (for some reason) that the Intel GPU was automatically disabled when the Ultrabay card was present, so I never installed any drivers for it. I don't know if bumblebee would work or how to get it to work with SLI, but both 750s did show up in the nVidia tool. – Roman Sep 04 '14 at 16:15

2 Answers2

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I tried all day on my y510p to get this working but for now I've determined we cannot boot the system with both video cards plugged in.

Note! The Lenovo y510p with Nvidia SLI has Intel Graphics AND Nvidia Graphics! You have to setup the intel video driver first, then move on to Nvidia.

Brightness Problem

If you get a black screen at login, try pressing Fn + Brightness+ (Up arrow) on your keyboard and you should be able to see the login box.

Enable Intel Video Driver

  1. Remove or backup your xorg.conf file if you have one 
    sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  2. Remove all nvidia stuff if you have anything: 
    sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
  3. Install the intel video driver (might already be installed): 
    sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
  4. Create a new file under the xorg.conf.d directory: 
    sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
  5. Copy/Paste this into the file: 
    Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel"
    Driver "intel"
EndSection
  6. Save it and exit
  7. Reboot the system and you should now have decent intel graphic acceleration working with no errors. 
    sudo reboot now
    or press the power button

Enable Nvidia Driver

To get the Nividia card working (for certain games & apps), you'll need nvidia drivers from the xorg edgers repo and Bumblebee. This method allows you to run a specific application with the nvidia driver active.

  1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 nvidia-331-settings bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
  4. Update the /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf file like in this answer:
    Using Nvidia 319 with bumblebee
Community
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Michael Butler
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For those who looking to enable SLI on mobile nvidia ... Do not waste your time like I did. Sadly all M series are not supported! Period. Keep throwing request at nVidia representatives. Perhaps this will change one day.

For now if you want to play on ubuntu with your laptop better get one higher-end graphic card rather than two SLI (for ubuntu only that is!)

Hardware requirements

SLI functionality requires:

Identical PCI Express graphics cards

A supported motherboard (with the exception of Quadro Plex)

In most cases, a video bridge connecting the two graphics cards

SLI Mosaic Mode requires NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.

For the latest information on supported SLI and Multi-GPU configurations, including SLI- and Multi-GPU capable GPUs and SLI-capable motherboards, see http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/sli.

Other Notes and Requirements

The following other requirements apply to SLI and Multi-GPU:

    Mobile GPUs are NOT supported <--------------------!!!!!

GPUs with ECC enabled may not be used in an SLI configuration

SLI on Quadro-based graphics cards always requires a video bridge

TwinView is also not supported with SLI or Multi-GPU. Only one display can be used when SLI or Multi-GPU is enabled, with the exception of Mosaic.

If X is configured to use multiple screens and screen 0 has SLI or Multi-GPU enabled, the other screens configured to use the nvidia driver will be disabled. Note that if SLI or Multi-GPU is enabled, the GPUs used by that configuration will be unavailable for single GPU rendering.

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/361.28/README/sli.html

DevWL
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