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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?

hakre
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  • 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 '14 at 06:16

1 Answers1

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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:

Richard
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  • Thanks for your answer, I will try that hopefully within the next 48 hours. – hakre Jan 27 '14 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 '14 at 06:18
  • 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 01 '14 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 01 '14 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 01 '14 at 15:25
  • Apparently this is a known bug that has not been officially fixed yet. It has stuck around since 10.04: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/562005 – Richard Feb 01 '14 at 15:31
  • I have removed the second from sources.list and I have ppa-...'ed the first one (before I tried the second). It's just that I have the feeling Ubuntu itself is unsure if/some packets to upgrade even updates exist. I assume this is related to all this. I did disable the proprietary nvidia drivers that ubtunu offered first. – hakre Feb 01 '14 at 16:38
  • Right... it's an unfixed bug, the only option you really have is to add your vote to the bug and wait until they release a fix, optionally forcing X to adjust the brightness as described in the bug. I am not sure whether Noveau supports brightness controls for this model... – Richard Feb 02 '14 at 02:03
  • I now tried pretty much and that Xorg fix does not work any longer. I'll try now with Fedora which I normally use and have used on that device however last time problem IIRC were related to that nvidia card as well. There is perhaps another problem with the W510 model itself as in the past I could at least control brightness via command-line but this is not possible any longer, too. In any case I blame myself for buying Nvidia hardware, never had such a hassle. – hakre Feb 04 '14 at 19:54
  • Fedora 20 runs this out of the box, just FYI. Not an Ubuntu solution though. – hakre Feb 11 '14 at 06:52