Lenovo Ideapad Y510 is Go (Continued / NEW)

[wyth]

Anyone upgraded to the beta of 8.10? I'm just curious how it runs on these machines, but I've just moved and not had internet access to download anything to test.

[ziptiespec]

I had 8.10b installed for about an hour on my brand new Y510 (1.6Ghz/Intel video). The brightness issue was present, though the button functionality was "circular" - you could keep hitting + or - and the screen would cycle from dimmest to brightest endlessly. Wireless didn't work out of the box. I didn't test the camera or anything else. I just installed 8.04 over 8.10b and am working on the brightness issue, and getting the card reader to work.

[HunterThomson]

helo everyone... been awile. My life has been taken over by Eternallands a MMORPG.


Chargersfan420. I have not used lilo before. If you were switching to grub then I could tell you that it would not be a problem you would just have to install grub on the MBR of the second harddrive and just edit the grub.config file. I am sure the same is true with lilo. You will have to uninstall grub then install lilo on the MBR of the HHD that you have ubuntu on. You can infact change the boot order of the hhd's. I chage that inorder to boot into backtrack on USB. Read up on lilo.

You should not have to mess with win at all. Hell just take out the win HHD and put in only one HHD then instll linux on that but use Lilo insted of grub. ((I don't know if ubuntu give you a option anymore)) Make sure you chose "Install Lilo to MBR". Then once you know lilo works you can go through the hassle of setting it up on your tri-boot system.

As for ubntntu 8.10. WOW we realy need to get in touch with some devs. This backlight thing is just not cool at all. I am running Kernal 2.6.27-ARCH. The problem with filing the bug is what the hell is broken???? Kernl? ACPI? Xorg? Video driver? Where do we post ??? The problem is cross distro....

[wyth]

Okay, so here's some 8.10 RC info.

I had started a long post about what worked and what didn't. Overall, it's great -- in general, better than 8.04. The screen brightness works better (except it cycles, as noted above), suspend/hibernate work, wifi, etc. But the sound problem is still there.

Here's what I don't get: I have the live CD in right now, and not only does the brightness work correctly -- meaning it stops when it reaches full brightness and doesn't start over -- but the sound works. It's not surround sound, but it works. It seems to be working with Pulse. But this is only on the live CD, not on the install.

Which makes me wonder if there's a way to get the correct settings of the live CD and just tweak the install, and voila, you have a flawless system. I'm just not sure where to begin looking here.

[wyth]

Okay, so I have 8.10 RC installed, with pretty fantastic results.

I did a clean install of the 8.10 Release Candidate recently, and things look great on the Lenovo Y510 IdeaPad -- better than 8.04.

Here's what I did:

• Downloaded the regular desktop .iso
• Made a list of all the apps and other things I use that I'll need to download again
• Made a backup of my sources.list file in my /home directory for all my extra repositories
• Checked my partitions -- I keep my /home directory in a separate partition. That's just a good idea, I think, because you don't have to spend much time keeping the look/feel/settings preferences consistent between upgrades. Hardly any time at all, actually
  
  • And when you install programs you once had, you won't need to adjust all the settings or anything. For instance, I have way too many podcast feeds in Amarok; I can wipe out my root partition and do a clean install, install Amarok again, and it'll pick up my previous config settings in my /home directory, and it's like nothing ever changed
• Manually partitioned everything to format the root (/) partition and use the pre-existing /home directory (don't format that)

Here's what I got:

• Wireless fires right up with the new 2.6.27 kernel
• The backlight is working again. However, it doesn't stop when you reach the top level of brightness -- it cycles through. (I think this was mentioned)
• The webcam is working almost correctly; the picture is good, but still upside down
• Suspend and Hibernate WORK -- woo-hoo!
• Sound didn't work out of the box. I didn't want to compile ALSA again (eventually had to, see next post), but I did get it to work
  
  • I installed linux-headers-lbm, linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic, medibuntu, ubuntu-restricted-extras, all that.
  • I set /etc/modules.d/alsa-base to options
  • ALSA didn't work on reboot; I was stuck with the two channels. Went into System - Preferences - Sound and switched the default to OSS. Changed the default in Amarok, in VLC, etc. to OSS. Whadaya know, the subwoofer is working, the sound is rich, and everything seemed great. This didn't last; headphones wouldn't turn off any sound when under OSS
  
  

So the sound is the big issue. Other than that, it's a slick system -- snappier, clean, and wait'll ya hear what's up with the sound now. Like I said, I didn't want to compile the drivers for ALSA again if I could help it. However, after three days of getting nothing done but messing with sound possibilities, I gave it. But I found something very interesting -- this bug suggests that the alsa-modules need to be compiled with the following options:

--with-card-options=hda-codec-realtek,hda-codec-analog,hda-codec-sigmatel,hda-codec-via,hda-codec-atihdmi,hda-codec-conexant,hda-codec-cmedia,hda-codec-si3054,hda-generic

. My sound card is a Realtek ALC888, and this was new to me.


So I gave in and compiled the latest ALSA drivers, 1.0.18rc3. However, I included that --with-card-options when configuring the driver, and I also found a new model to add to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base -- lenovo-sky.


Now I'm no expert, so I don't know for sure if it was the --with-card-options or the lenovo-sky or both, but not only do I have my 6 channel sound, but:

• All the nifty little system sounds work again -- the drums and greeting at boot, etc. Those were gone when I compiled my own drivers in 8.04
• All the surround sound elements automatically mute when headphones are plugged in -- no need to mute
• Note: in System-Preferences-Sessions, I have PulseAudio Session Management ticked OFF. I had it set like that from before -- I'm not certain yet if it makes a difference or not. It certainly doesn't hurt.

I'm not sure why this stuff can't be included in a default install, especially since the live CD seems to work (but lacks the surround sound). But if you're willing to compile the ALSA drivers again, 8.10 is looking like it could be the best version of Ubuntu yet for the Lenovo Ideapads.

I'll post an updated ALSA compile guide next.

[wyth]

Okay, I'm just basically reposting what is already on this Ubuntu help page and on the previous Lenovo Ideapad Y510 is GO page, but with some new tweaks. This guide is using the 1.0.18rc3 ALSA drivers, but this will/should work for other drivers.

First, you need to make sure you have the right stuff installed:

  sudo aptitude install build-essential libncurses-dev gettext linux-headers-`uname -r`

Next get the latest ALSA drivers; they'll be downloaded to wherever your default downloads go, but you're going to move them to a new directory. For this case, I'll use the Desktop.

• alsa-driver
• alsa-lib
• alsa-utils

Next step is to create a /usr/src/alsa directory for the files and copy the tar.bz2 files to that directory; you may have this directory of you've rolled your own drivers in the past:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/src/alsa
cd /usr/src/alsa
sudo cp ~/Desktop/alsa* .
sudo tar xjf alsa-driver*.bz2
sudo tar xjf alsa-lib*.tar.bz2
sudo tar xjf alsa-utils*.tar.bz2

• Compile and install alsa-driver

cd alsa-driver* 
sudo ./configure --with-card-options=hda-codec-realtek,hda-codec-analog,hda-codec-sigmatel,hda-codec-via,hda-codec-atihdmi,hda-codec-conexant,hda-codec-cmedia,hda-codec-si3054,hda-generic
sudo make
sudo make install

• Compile and install alsa-lib

cd ../alsa-lib* 
sudo ./configure 
sudo make 
sudo make install

• Compile and install alsa-utils

cd ../alsa-utils* 
sudo ./configure 
sudo make 
sudo make install

Next find out what sound card you're using:

  cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

The Y510 uses RealTek ALC888, so look for that. (This may be different if you have a newer version of the Y510 with some different hardware.)

Next you can check the ALSA-Configuration for specifics on the sound card. I found it at

  /usr/src/alsa/alsa-driver*/alsa-kernel/Documentation/ALSA-Configuration.txt

Look for the section titled ALC883/888. There are many possible options, and some work better than others.

‣ 3stack-6ch
‣ 3stack-6ch-intel
‣ lenovo-101e (Lenovo 101E)
‣ lenovo-nb0763 ( Lenovo NB0763)
‣ lenovo-ms7195-dig (Lenovo MS7195)
‣ lenovo-sky (Lenovo Sky)
‣ auto (Gets the information from BIOS)

Next to tell alsa-base what to do:

  sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

at the end of that file, add:

  options snd-hda-intel model=MODEL

For model=MODEL, use one of the options from above, such as:

‣ options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo-sky

I found model=lenovo-sky worked beautifully.
Reboot and see if it's working. In the past, kernel updates did not break this. The surround sound features are present, the system sounds work, and the headphones automatically mute all speakers when plugged in.

[JSuresh]

With the newly compiled ALSA drivers for Intrepid, do you have to mute/turn on each speaker separately as we've had to so far? If not, I'll probably stick with Gutsy..

[wyth]

Nope -- set your settings once, and it sticks. No need to constantly reset things.

Note: PulseAudio Session Manager will try to take over the sound settings and that will mess with them. Just go to System - Preferences - Sessions and untick it (using ALSA, you don't need it anyhow).

And you can turn on all the surround sound features, plug in headphones, and they automatically mute -- no need to manually mute them.

[wyth]

UPDATE:
There was a kernel upgrade today, and it required compiling the drivers again. No big deal; just use the terminal, get into that /usr/src/alsa directory, repeat the above steps, reboot, and you have your beautiful sound back.

[chargersfan420]

Hey everyone, it's been a little while for me too.

@HunterThomson - Thank you for the response. I've actually been through a couple of nightmare situations since my last post.

First, my Ubuntu drive flooded. It turns out that Virtualbox was the culprit. Long ago i had moved my VDI file to a different partition to avoid this error, but what i didn't realize was that i had taken a few snapshots that were saved to the Ubuntu drive, and they were getting bigger. Virtualbox doesn't let you re-locate snapshot files, which i was very displeased to find out... Some googling revealed it is a "low priority feature request" at this point.

So, the only way to fix my problem and keep my virtualbox was to resize my partition. After doing this, Ubuntu was unbootable, and it turns out that somehow my partitions got re-numbered. I managed to get this going again with a lot of messing around. My boot process looks horrible now.

I also noticed that Firefox 3 was eating up quite a bit of RAM and i wanted Virtualbox to have more too, so i upgraded from 2 GB to 4 GB. Once i did this, Ubuntu wouldn't boot at all. I get the screen that says:
Kernel alive. Direct mapping tables up to 14000000 @ 8000-e000
I could have that wrong, i'm just typing it from memory... but Ubuntu would hang right there. I also notice with the RAM upgrade, the numbers changed... it used to be 1000000 (give or take a few zeros) and 8000-d000.

I checked the obvious solutions already - Vista and XP boot fine, i can boot from CD just fine, and i ran Memtest for 9 hours and passed 4 times. I'm completely baffled.

So, i decided i'm going to give up on Hardy and try out Intrepid (assuming a fresh install will fix this 4 GB = no boot problem). I have 100 spare GB to work with, and i'm looking for a little advice now...
- Can i re-use the home folder of Hardy when I set up Intrepid?
- Anyone have a suggestion of how big i should make my / partition, and how big my /home partition should be? It would probably be good to store all virtualbox related files in the /home partition so i can cleanly install newer versions to their own partitions and not lose anything...