W541 Drivers
Evelyn Normington
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The Graphics you name work with the proprietary nVidia driver. To do this, open the Software & Updates utility, go to the Additional drivers tab and select nvidia-331 for your graphics card, then reboot.
A faster option would be to run the command sudo apt-get install nvidia-common nvidia-331 from a terminal, then reboot. This also works, if you're unable to use Ubuntu with a graphical frontend due to a non-working driver. In this case, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1, log in and run the command.
Another problem you may encounter are wrong LAN/WiFi/BT drivers, which may result in slow internet connections. As you didn't name the Ethernet or WiFi chip in your question, you should best look at the chip manufacturer's website and look for Linux drivers, or ask another question here, if you don't find any information about it.
Yes Ubuntu runs on the Thinkpad W540 very well. I am using Ubuntu on the W540 to reply to this message. The W540 ran the trusty and vivid releases of Ubuntu without any problems. I upgraded to a SSD drive for the boot drive (update your BIOS before doing that). I normally use the W540 for work so primarily use the Intel graphics to save power and heat, but I have installed the Nvidia graphics driver to play some PC games. Steam works very well on Ubuntu and the W540.
I currently have Lenovo W540, 32GB RAM, I7-4700MQ, 512GB SSD. I'm using Ubuntu 19.04 and I can tell there is a problem in the GRUB loader as it takes around 10 seconds to load the screen. But after I boot, it works normally.
With double boot install you've to hold Fn+Escape (before start button) button UP to and until the underine below LENOVO (secure boot screen) a appears then you could relax your left fingers and wait for lenovo advantage... upline , then finally the grub appears if you've good eyes or magnifier you can select Ubuntu, ..versions, windows10 (TPM 1.2 !) or UEFI Bios settings.Hope it will help i lost some hairs for this TiPLenovo W540 Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (secure boot active installed with MokManager)
I installed latest drivers from Intel and Nvidia and I got an 'Unsupported Drivers" message error for both cards upon starting premiere. The app will start but after using for a few minutes and editing clips (currently editing 4K clips) the video playback rendering gets completely messed up. Choppy, jumps around, freezes, etc. Happens every single time I (try to) edit. Audio tracks work 100% no issues.
I've tried all the different GPU render acceleration modes to no success. There is a support page on Lenovo with Adobe verified "Nvidia Optimus" drivers, but only for windows 8 and 7. I have windows 10.
Guess what? You have only a 4th-Generation CPU. However, Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 now requires a 6th-Generation or newer CPU just to run properly. Plus, Intel has effectively EOL'd all driver support outside of archived driver releases for all 5th-Generation and older CPUs.
This has really opened my eyes to how awful Adobe's Creative Cloud is. You are forced into a subscription model, forced into updates, and forced into having an obsolete computer. Truth is, I could be using Photoshop from 10 years ago and not really missing any features. Premiere from 5 years ago. Yet I'm being forced to pay thousands of dollars extra in software and hardware just to continue doing what I did years ago. I should have bought the last version of non-subscription based Adobe Suite and just kept it running on a Windows 7 or Mac if I knew this was going to happen.
Well, the hardware industry itself is pushing all software companies into doing the exact same thing. Hardware manufacturers have been cutting driver support (and with it, security and compatibility fixes) for all of their products that are more than three or four years old. And old software and drivers are now suffering from security holes that will never be patched at all - not even by their own companies.
And with older systems, don't be surprised if a ton of malware gets into that PC, and that malware will never be removed even with the latest malware removers that are compatible with it. Some of that malware is ransomware, which will force you to pay a ton of money to those crooks just to even get your PC to run well. Most others will simply slow down your PC way down.
I have attempted to install Garuda Dr460nized Gaming Edition onto my Lenovo ThinkPad W541 (w/ nvidia Quadro k1100m). Booting the live image works just fine (though I am unable to see the initial GRUB menu that allows for allowing/disabling proprietary drivers), but I am unable to successfully boot on the installed system (systemd seems to initialize properly, but at some point the screen goes grey and then a Lenovo Splash screen appears (no error messages) at which point everything freezes and I am forced to reboot).
Interestingly enough, when I had placed my old hard drive with the same edition of Garuda on it (installed for an hp envy x360 m6-w105dx in case it is relevant), it had worked just fine (minus the nvidia card as it uses different drivers). Any help with this issue would be appreciated.
Hi there, welcome to the forum!
One thing you could try, since it is a fresh install, is burning and installing the Dr460nized non-gaming edition.
For some still unknown reasons, the gaming edition seems to be giving booting problems to many new users recently.
Then you can install from the tools every gaming thing you need.
I have already redone my mirrorlists but I cannot seem to fix this problem. I have also tried to manually set up my resolv.conf file as I have found others mentioning this might be an issue for internet access within chroot.
However, for whatever reason I am unable to make any changes to the file or even delete it (I've tried changing permissions with chattr but receive error: "operation not supported while reading flags on /etc/resolve.conf"). I have also made a separate file with the appropriate nameservers and changed the path in resolvconf.conf to no avail.
I think it might be useful to copy the exact commands (inputs and outputs) executed in your terminal from the live USB, to see how you chrooted and what you tried afterwards.
Maybe it can provide some insights...
I just updated my system to Ubuntu 16.04 and ran into a login loop. It seems to be bumblebee that was causing the issue as it seems to have been deprecated in 16.04 due to lack of support in favor of Nvidia Prime[10]. Removing bumblebee fixed the issue for me (I also reinstalled Mesa following the procedure in this article but I am not sure if that helped or not). I am still using nvidia-current (nvidia-304).
As a programmer, I have need for Linux at my fingertips. Windows is great for browsing and gaming, but, unless I am specifically creating a Windows application, I want to be using Linux for any kind of development. The Lenovo W541 comes pre-loaded with Windows 8.1 and so it is obviously compatible with Windows but Linux distributions seem to give the system some trouble.
On my last laptop, I dual-booted Windows 7 and Fedora Workstation. I constantly use Ubuntu at work and so I like to have a little bit of variety and use Fedora for my schoolwork and personal development and so I thought I would run Fedora on my new laptop as well. Little did I know the issues I would run into.
This was with the default BIOS settings. I tried changing the UEFI boot settings to Legacy Only which got me to the Fedora Live desktop and I was able to start installation but then Fedora would totally freeze and I would have to hard shutdown the laptop with the power button. This would occur every time I tried even after further tweaking BIOS settings and even updating the BIOS.
Researching this issue, I did not find anything specific to Fedora but I did find others having issues installing Linux distributions on the Lenovo W541. The most relevant posts I found were a post on the Ubuntu forums which also linked to a bug ticket on Launchpad. The issue described seemed to have the same root cause as mine but with Ubuntu. One reply to the bug ticket laid out a procedure which the poster claimed got the system to work with an Ubuntu installation. Since I am familiar with Ubuntu and I hold no particular loyalty to Fedora, I decided to try out this procedure to see if I could get any Linux distribution running.[1][2]
Once Ubuntu is installed on the system, we want to blacklist the nouveau driver so that it is not loaded by the kernel on boot and we also want to setup the NVIDIA drivers with bumblebee/primus. Bumblebee allows for the switching between the integrated Intel graphics cards and the NVIDIA card.
With that taken care of, we can install bumblebee. With older versions of Ubuntu, bumblebee had to be installed via a PPA, but it is now integrated into the standard software repositories. Run the following command to install bumblebee:[5]
Now we want to setup the bumblebee configuration to use our NVIDIA drivers. The bumblebee configuration file is located in the /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf file.[5] In the [bumblebeed] section, we want to set the Driver parameter to nvidia. Then, in the [nvidia] section, we want to set the KernelDriver parameter to nvidia-current[2] and the LibraryPath and XorgModulePath parameters should have their nvidia-current versions of their paths.[6] For example, these are my two versions of these parameters:
Synaptics for Linux apparently does not currently support the trackpad on the W541. You should therefore not use Synaptics in your Linux installation but instead use the imps protocol. This can be set up by modifying the /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf file (or creating it if it does not exist) by adding the following line:[2]
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