Hi OP and everyone else,
I'm using Mint 14, 64-bit, on my Y580, installed it earlier around January this year. I thought I'd share my experience here to help out those with installation problems.
There seems to be some variation in the Y580 hardware being sold, so certain things might not be applicable to your case. I'll just state my experience on installation, plus a few extra things that needs to be done post-installation.
Pre-installation
The first issue is the partitions on the disk drive. The Y580 comes with a HDD with four partitions, which means it has maxed out.
So, if you're doing dual boot like me, you'll need to wipe one partition, resize, set it as an extended partition and re-split it into more partition as you deem fit in ext4. You can use GParted, the disk partitioning tool, included in the Mint live desktop.
For me, I think it is not advisable to wipe the whole disk, mainly because of Lenovo's proprietary utilities that controls the laptop hardware. Unfortunately, one such useful utility that linux does not have an equivalent is laptop battery power management (I did some searching, but couldn't find a working battery power charge augmentation solution. I'll be glad to change this if someone can point me in some direction).
You can set your battery's maximum charge to be 60% via Lenovo's "Battery Protection Mode". This power charge level will stay even when you boot into Mint.
If the battery is constantly at 100% charge due to consistent power supply, the battery life will be affected negatively. The Lithium Ion battery life will get seriously affected at extreme ends of charge capacity, mainly 100% and near 0%. If it really does reach zero, it'll be dead.
I chose to tinker with the LENOVO partition, so I copied out the LENOVO partition, and put it in an external disk. I then do my partitioning, then created back the ntfs LENOVO partition in the extended partition.
Installation
For me the most challenging thing about installation is the ethernet card that doesn't work, wireless doesn't work too, so you couldn't update your software.
I got part of the installation instructions from
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Le ... eaPad_Y580
To prevent link rot, I'll post some of the instructions here as well.
The first thing you need before installation, is a copy of the ethernet card driver, which isn't in the kernel yet when I installed.
Get the driver from here
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel ... -u.tar.bz2
*Note the download link changed, I used the compat-wireless-2012-03-12-p.tar.bz2 during my install.
Run the Mint 14 installation disc, and you should be able to boot into a mint live desktop interface. Copy the driver archive file into your drive and do this:
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tar -xjvf compat*
cd compat*
./scripts/driver-select alx
make
sudo make install
This should make your ethernet work, and then you can get your wireless driver from updates with a working ethernet connection. (you need the interwebz from a ethernet cable!) (I forgot about how I got wireless here.)
Edit: I remembered. For Wireless, the linux package works. Check your Network controller.
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lspci | grep Network
Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
If yours is similar, you can just install it with:
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sudo apt-get install bcmwl-kernel-source
Do not use the b43-fwcutter package, those are for other versions of the network card.
This should settle the basic installation.
*Note: you have to redo the ethernet controller driver installation, and wireless network controller install again after rebooting, as you've only installed into the live desktop for Mint installation.
Post-Installation
A few other problems past this:
- battery life
-- Nvidia Optimus hybrid graphics
-- CPU clocking adjustments
- webcam
The other problems now is probably battery life, we'll first look at the hybrid graphics problem. All linux distros can't deal properly with hybrid graphics. The hybrid graphics card will turn on your powerful card by default, draining your battery life.
Hybrid Graphics
Although Nvidia recently released driver support on Linux for the optimus graphics, I haven't really tried it. The current solution that you need is Bumblebee.
http://bumblebee-project.org/install.html
More installation instructions
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee#Installation
You'll need to:
1. update the linux-headers
2. install nvidia drivers
3. then install bumblebee
This installation instructions from Github has clearer details (I know, too much information everywhere!).
Try the basic ubuntu installation, if it doesn't work, then follow the one on github bumblebee project
https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee
And, FAQ
https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/FAQ
I remember doing a lot of extra unneeded installation steps, so I'll skip the details (I can't remember them too). It should work when you just install bumblebee,
in addition to one final step below.
Note: bumbleed switches off your nvidia card during boot, and uses the less-energy intensive intel graphics. The only thing you should take note about, is running graphics intensive programs. There are two ways (both running commands from terminal):
1. through "optirun" command using virtualgl, or
2. "primusrun" using primus which is experimental
To see whether bumblee is indeed working, run this command:
You should see something like this:
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Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
Card-2: NVIDIA Device 0fd4 bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1080@59.9hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ivybridge Mobile GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.0.3 Direct Rendering: Yes
Note the GLX Renderer using Mesa.
Then run it using using optirun:
You should see this:
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Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0
Card-2: NVIDIA Device 0fd4 bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.13.0 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1080@59.9hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 660M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.2.0 NVIDIA 304.88 Direct Rendering: Yes
Note the GLX Renderer using the GeForce card now.
Both command somewhat works but, with quirks on support of different application. I've ran test using webgl (using optirun command).
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl
http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/a ... arium.html
You need to disable gpu blacklist by chrome first.
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optirun --debug google-chrome --ignore-gpu-blacklist
Then check whether WebGL is enabled in chrome by looking at GPU status in the browser. Type this in the browser address bar:
Installing bumblebee wasn't that much of a pain as it did back before the new bumblebee project is reborned. However, there is a quirk with Mint 14, that you have to edit some files to let the bumblebeed daemon run at startup.
Here's the bug issue with a solution:
https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bu ... issues/337
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start on (runlevel [2345])
stop on (runlevel [016])
... place these stanzas back in /etc/init/bumblebeed.conf file instead of the following:
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start on (login-session-start or desktop-session-start)
stop on (desktop-shutdown)
After bumblebeed was setup properly, my battery life went from a meagre less than 2 hours, to about 4 hours on Low LCD brightness.
And the next step on CPU clockspeed pushed my battery life to more than 6 hours, on low LCD brightness.
CPU Clockspeed
This is the easy part, but there are lots of information out there I had to filter through to get here.
You only need to install indicator-cpufeq from synaptic, should come installed with cpufreqd, and cpufrequtils as well.
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sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq
The icon in the system tray doesn't work, but just click on it to select a clock speed you desire.
I usually choose "Powersave" when on battery.
Web Camera
It seems to work out of the box (probably, I couldn't remember).
You can install "cheese" from the package manager to test it out.
Skype's webcam support however, seems flaky.
Hope the above information helps. I missed out some because I couldn't remember. (I checked my past bash command history, my god, I'm reliving the installation nightmare of stupid moves)
I'll add more to it should you report back with difficulties.