Hello, I have recently purchased a new Lenovo Ideapad 470 with nvidia gt550m as well as sandybridge integrated graphics. I have installed the drivers from the Nvidia site as I have with all my other nvidia cards, and I am having a problem. i linked gcc4.3 to gcc so the installer compiles and installs everything correctly, however after i run nvidia-xconfig and reboot my gui is broken. When it says "starting kdm" on boot, instead of going to the normal login screen, it stays on the terminal screen and my x-session through kde never starts. I have set grub to the nomodeset option, as well as blacklisted and uninstalled nouveau, and blacklisted i915 drivers. When I look at the nvidia logs i get this error message:
when I delete the xorg.conf that nvidia-xconfig created I get back to normal GUI desktop, but without only the limited graphics(no effects, compositing, openGL, etc.) Why is this happening? I have looked all over the internet and encountered similar problems in other places, but to no avail. Also, do not ask me to switch to installed the drivers "The Debian Way" or by using smxi. I have tried both of those and am happy with neither.

I'd guess its an IdeaPad Y470. There are a few X470 Lonovo laptops, its always best to include the whole model number.

The IdeaPad Y470 with nVidia GPUs are using optimus. Optimus has no offical support from nVidia. Unless you can use a BIOS switch to 'force' the nVidia GPU, or somebody has made a custom EDID file to get the nVidia GPU running, there is nothing you can do to use the nVidia GPU.

There is meant to be work being done to get optimus working better with linux, but who knows how long it will take, or how good the results will be.

that answer is disappointing, although not entirely unexpected. I guess I will just have to wait it out.

Sorry its disappointing. Hopefully someone sorts out this optimus mess sooner or later.

Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but have you gotten Linux to run satisfactorily on the IdeaPad Y470 with the Nvidia GPU switched off, using the Intel HD Graphics instead? Are all other components working OK?