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Nvidia drivers on Lenovo T520

Update: Unless you are playing games or something, I see no reason to use the Nvidia drivers.  After I installed the Nvidia drivers the external display was not auto-detected and required a restart of Gnome-shell to recognize the updated config.  Once I did that, it started in Gnome-fallback mode?  Bummer...  So - nouveau is the better option... IMO.

I had decided to put Fedora 16 back on my rig.  I know this install won't be on this machine long as it has some quirky issues (sudden desktop lockups, WLAN occasionally flakes out, etc... I digress...)  I also decided to try the Nvidia proprietary driver, along with using the discrete Nvidia graphics chipset.

So - the process was fairly straight-forward.

# yum -y update
# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# yum install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs
# mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
# dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

update /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.lvm.lv=vg_neo/lv_swap rd.md=0 rd.dm=0  KEYTABLE=us quiet SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.lvm.lv=vg_neo/lv_root LANG=en_US.UTF-8"
to include the 2 nouveau entries
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.lvm.lv=vg_neo/lv_swap rd.md=0 rd.dm=0  KEYTABLE=us quiet SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.lvm.lv=vg_neo/lv_root LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0"

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Reboot your Lenovo and press the ThinkVantage button when it asks, press F1 to edit BIOS settings.
go into Config | Display
I changed it to the Discrete Value, disabled the OS detect Optimus
When you now boot you should notice immediately that your grub has higher resolution.

Otherwise everything else seems the same.  But...

Using Nouveau I would get around 60FPS using glxgears...
Using Nvidia ...
[jradtke@neo bin]$ glxgears
30718 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6143.429 FPS
30892 frames in 5.0 seconds = 6178.211 FPS

It will actually drive the machine enough to have the fan spin up.  Was this worth the 30 minutes I devoted to this?  Probably not - as I am fairly certain that my external monitor will no longer work using this driver and my battery life will be diminished... but GLXgears rocks now. ;-)

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