Hello.

It's time to get a new laptop. I'm thinking of the Lenovo W550s which is, apparently, Linux certified.

https://support.lenovo.com/ca/en/documents/pd100744

I am wondering if anyone here has run Slackware on this laptop and if so, were there any major issues.

Thanks for your time.

Hello,

I am the happy owner of a W520, running Slackware with no issue at all.

Only caveat: I had to include in the command line (in /etc/lilo.conf in my case) this kernel parameter to reliably boot:
append = nox2apic

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. To clarify, without that parameter it would sometimes boot and sometimes not? Naturally, I'll try the defaults first.

Yes. But what is true for a model is not necessarily true for another one. This is a known issue and solution for at least some W520 and W530 models, maybe not newer ones.Of course.

I've got a T450s, the internals should be mostly the same. On my laptop, the ethernet port doesn't show up under Slackware 14.1 (default settings only, I didn't spend any time looking for driver issues and whatnot). If you want to run Slackware on your W550s, it's quite likely you'll need to run -current or wait until the next stable release.

I installed SlackWare 14.1 on a Lenovo W540 ThinkPad. The installation
was described on the Laptop forum: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...highlight=W540.

I've been very satisfied with it.

Just curious about bluetooth on those, especially the T450 - does it work, and if so, is it a Broadcom chip?

There is one additional thing worth checking before you make the purchase. Namely, W550s probably has NVIDIA Optimus technology in place, that makes it possible for operating system to switch between using built-in Intel graphics card, and NVIDIA graphics card (with the idea to use Intel graphics card most of the time, for extended battery life, and to switch to use NVIDIA graphics card for heavy-duty OpenGL rendering, and eventually CUDA-enabled applications that utilize graphics card for numerical calculations, only). The problem is that Optimus is still not fully supported under Linux, so by default you'll have Intel graphics card used all the time, and you can use NVIDIA card only for CUDA computations, if you install NVIDIA proprietary driver. However, most of the time, it's possible to turn off Optimus, and use NVIDIA graphics card all the time (both for display, either using nouveau open-source driver or NVIDIA proprietary driver, and for CUDA computation, in case you decide for NVIDIA proprietary driver), in system BIOS, but not all laptops have that options enabled in BIOS, so it's worth verifying that W550s makes this switching possible. I guess that it has, as most Lenovo notebooks do, but I'd still check. If it doesn't, you still have an option to go for it, and be able to manually force specific applications to use NVIDIA graphics card using Bumblebee, but it's kind of cumbersome.

BTW, if you're not in big hurry to make this purchase, you may wish to wait until Thinkpad P50 available, as it should be big upgrade over W550s. I'm also looking to replace my trusty W520 (happily running for its fifth year), but decided to wait for P50.

1 members found this post helpful.

I do not know about W550s so yes, that's worth checking. On my W520 I can choose between Integrated Graphics, Discrete Graphics and Nvidia Optimus and in the latter case I can or not actually enable Optimus. The help text says "If enabled, System BIOS automatically switches graphics settings to Nvidia Optimus if the OS supports it and to Discrete Graphics if the OS does not support it". That's nice to have these possibilities.

Also, the firmware allows to work in UEFI mode, Legacy mode or both, in the latter case with booting priority on either Legacy or UEFI mode. I feel very comfortable to have these possibilities as well.

Indeed, after so-called Secure Boot turned off in BIOS, UEFI stuff (GPT partitioning, ELILO booting) works very well with Slackware on W520. And these features are also good to check regarding Linux support on other alike machines.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? What is this UEFI stuff?

Thanks for all the informative replies so far. Every time I post here I am impressed by the Slackware community and glad I chose that version of Linux for my daily needs.

Some pointers to articles that will answer better than I could:
http://www.uefi.org/faq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifie...ware_Interface
http://www.rodsbooks.com/linux-uefi/
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/

Practically, the firmware of your machine will probably (to be checked) be able to work in both UEFI and Legacy (aka BIOS) modes. To use UEFI you will need to choose the 64-bit edition of Slackware version 14.1. Both editions (32-bit and 64-bit) can use the Legacy mode.

To know more about Slackware, visit http://docs.slackware.com.

Hi,
I have a W530 running Slackware 14.1. The noX2apic problem only occurs if you have the legacy bios setting enabled. If you enable EFI then the x2apic problem goes away. Of course you then have to use EFI for booting, but that is going to be the norm anyway.

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org

Afraid I can't help you on this one, the first thing I did when I received mine was to swap out the original NIC for a different one. My memory suggests it was a RealTek (I bought the T450s with the cheapest possible NIC), but don't quote me on that.