Lenovo G450 on Hardy Heron

[Samhain13]

Hello people. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a thread asking for opinions regarding a lappie purchase: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1298846

I finally got one last Friday (and many thanks to a lot of people out in the mid-west United States, but that's another story). I chose a Lenovo G450 with an NVIDIA GeForce G 105M graphics card, and in this thread, I would like to document my experience with it. I'm doing this because I found it hard to get any information over the Internet about this particular machine and any attempts to use Ubuntu with it. So, hopefully, this thread will give other an idea about this.

Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD Environment

Live session's desktop resolution is limited to 800x600 pixels. And because the this unit has a widescreen format, the display is stretched (parang Chinese movies).

Running the hardware test, everything except the test video was successful. Also tested the built-in camera using Ekiga. The camera was detected, there was also a video image but it had green lines running across it.

Installation went well.

Post Install, Update and Upgrade

Desktop resolution still limited and stretched. Hardware Drivers box does not show the video card's supposed restricted drivers. Running "lspci" yeilds something like "VGA: NVIDIA Unknown Chipset".

So I ran "sudo update-pciids" and afterward, "lspci" again. The correct name for the video card appeared but still no restricted drivers indicated.

Installed Cheese, built-in camera seems to be working fine there but still green in Ekiga.

At some point, I was prompted to install the restricted drivers for the wireless device: Broadcom STA wireless driver. Installed it but have not tested Bluetooth or any wireless connection yet though.

Installed Linux Display Driver - X86 version 190.42

Right now, it's working but there's a quirk. Here's what I did (I forget the link but I fount the steps here in the forum also):

0. Install build-essential (sudo apt-get build-essential)
1. Logout from the graphical session.
2. Log-in to a terminal (ctrl + alt + f1)
3. Logged-in as root (sudo su)
4. Stopped GDM (/etc/init.d/gdm stop)
5. Removed existing xorg.conf (rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
6. Ran the NVIDIA script (sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-190.42-pkg1.run)
7. Logged-off root.
8. Restarted GDM (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start).
9. Logged-in to the desktop.

Now I have 1366x768 and able to activate desktop effects. The quirk is, when I reboot, the display gets messed up and I have to get into safe graphics mode and reconfigure the display.

The work-around I'm using now is to not reboot or shutdown. When I need to power down the lappie, I just hibernate it.

But while I was writing this post, I came across another set of instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaManual

I'll try it out and edit this part as necessary.

To be continuued...

[ojtibi]

Very informative post, and very helpful too! Hopefully for your next installment may ma post ka ring tips that could help solve my issues on the Lenovo G400 (which is non-production na AFAIK). Otherwise, I'm gonna request na lang a hardware upgrade from our IT department. (why did Intel ever have to manufacture the GMA is above me...)

[Samhain13]

...continuation

Re: NVIDIA | Xorg

I just tried the instructions that I posted earlier, and it worked. I can now shutdown and power-up and no problems when it comes to graphics.

One thing I noticed though is that my Touchpad's vertical scrolling no longer worked. So, I modified xorg.conf-- basically merging the old one (generated when I first installed Hardy) and the one generated by nvidia-xconfig(?) when I installed the driver. Here's the file:

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 1.0  (buildmeister@builder63)  Tue Oct 20 21:00:15 PDT 2009

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Synaptics Touchpad" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load           "dbe"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "type1"
    Load           "freetype"
    Load           "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
	Driver		"synaptics"
	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/psaux"
	Option		"Protocol"		"auto-dev"
	Option		"HorizEdgeScroll"	"0"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Generic Keyboard"
	Driver		"kbd"
	Option		"XkbRules"	"xorg"
	Option		"XkbModel"	"pc105"
	Option		"XkbLayout"	"us"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "LGD"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 75.0
    VertRefresh     60.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce G 105M"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1366x768 +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

(Again, just in case the reader landed on this post from a web search: This is for the LENOVO G450 with the NVIDIA GeForce G 150M graphics card.)


Other Stuff Since OP

Tested Bluetooth connectivity on my phone (SE W810i). Lappie and phone can bond; lappie can browse the phone's files; lappie can get files from the phone. I haven't tested transferring files from lappie to phone though.

Installed Blender 2.49a. Works fine as far as I can tell.

Installed Skype. I was able to get a good picture from the camera (see OP, part about Ekiga), and was able to make a test call. Works fine-- again, as far as I can tell.