Dell XPS L702x Ubuntu 11.04

Update 15-March-2012 Very happy with this laptop on the whole. My only disappointment is that I'm unable to make the best use of the graphics card. Hopefully as more people get into Ubuntu/Linux as a personal desktop the graphics card companies will provide faster driver support and we will get the most out of these kick arse laptops. ----------------- [Solved!] Ok, I think I've got it! I'd never used the Ubuntu Display Settings tool before, but it seems to work pretty well, and it even supports multi-monitor! Load it at System->Preferences->Monitors. If you have your display port cable plugged in then it should just detect all your monitors and you can set them up with individual resolutions, etc. Oh man, the number of hours I've spent on this and of course it is actually so easy. Note that when you set your monitor input source to Display Port it seems to take about 10 seconds to actually switch, so be patient at that step. [UPDATE 18-Oct-2011] There was a question about my xorg.conf. I have no xorg.conf, I think this is no longer required, instead something called KMS (Kernel Model Settings) is used. To configure that there are some tools such as xrandr. The display tool didn't detect the highest resolution that my monitor supports so I added it manually. See this link for more details. http://askubuntu.com/questions/37411/screen-resolution-stuck-at-1024x768 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution For my Dell 2711 I ran these two lines: xrandr --newmode "1920x1200_60.00" 193.25 1920 2056 2256 2592 1200 1203 1209 1245 -hsync +vsync xrandr --addmode HDMI1 "1920x1200_60.00" (Not sure why it thinks I'm connected to HDMI, when it is actually connected to Display Port via DVI converter, perhaps that's why it's confused about the resolution options) Then set them to run on startup in /etc/gdm/Init/Default just before "initctl ..." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution A good write up done here: http://www.cmdematos.com/2011/10/ubuntu-1110-oneric-on-dell-xps17-l702x.html [The Drama] I've got a shiny new laptop from Dell, and I was expecting the usual difficulties configuring the graphics card, but nothing like this! The graphics card in the L702x is the GeForce GT 555M with Optimus support, it is typically referred to as a hybrid system where the GeForce card connects to an onboard card which is basically designed so the laptop can run in low power mode unless you need the power of the GeForce beast. This is so the system can run longer on batteries. So anyway, I kind of knew it would be an issue when I bought it, but a quick look around a the blogs I saw a bunch of people saying they had it working, so I didn't worry too much. But, then when I started to try to configure this it turns out it is not easy, in fact at the time of writing this, I've still not solved the issue, but wanted to get down my testing to date as I have spent many hours on this problem. So firstly what works. Well if you just install Ubuntu 11.04 the basic graphic card will work fine on your laptop monitor and you will think all is good in the world, however if you want to connect an external monitor, or make use of the power of the GeForce card, then this is where things start getting tricky. Firstly you will google about and find a link to here https://github.com/Mrmeee/ironhide/issues/2 and you will get to the end of that article and see this: sudo apt-get remove ironhide nvidia-current nvidia-settings acpi-call-dkms sudo apt-get autoremove rm /usr/local/bin/ironhide* # then reinstall everything but ironhide sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings acpi-call-dkms # Reboot sudo apt-get install ironhide # go through ironhide setup Which works fine if you pick the right configuration. Yay, success, but no, you are not done yet. What about connecting your external monitor? Well here is where the fun really starts. ([EDIT] See solution above, use display port with the built in Monitors tool) So here is what I've learned so far. The config file that nvidia settings gui generates doesn't seem to work. Note that you need to use ironhide-settings to get to that GUI, you cannot get to it from nvidia-settings. So I've tried a bunch of different combinations, but basically you get one of two results. 1) The system will not boot and you have to delete xorg.conf manually (hold shift during startup and boot to recovery console) You see no screens found in the /var/log/Xorg.8.log 2) The system does boot, but your screen is blank. Now I think in this case the system believes it is outputting to some screen, but I've tried plugging in both HDMI and DisplayPort cables and setting by monitor input source, but there does not seem to be any actual output. Not sure how to analyse this. ([EDIT] See solution, maybe I had both HDMI and Display Port cables plugged in and that is why it didn't output to the monitor, not too sure, and don't have time to test again.) If you use the ironhide generated xorg.conf.nvidia file it works for your laptop monitor, and I figured out how to modify it to work for an external monitor, but not both. So if it was set up for external then you unplugged the external, then it wouldn't work for the laptop monitor! References: https://github.com/Mrmeee/ironhide/issues/2 https://github.com/inbox/13403958 https://github.com/MrMEEE/ironhide/issues/56 http://www.cmdematos.com/2011/10/ubuntu-1110-oneric-on-dell-xps17-l702x.html http://askubuntu.com/questions/37411/screen-resolution-stuck-at-1024x768 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RandR https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution