Re: installed Fedora 18 on my laptop

[Noah Norris <preludelinux@gmail.com>]

sounds like an nvidia optimus laptop where you have 2x gpus (1x nvidia , 1x intel) there is some experimental support for getting this to work. but is unsupported by nvidia as far as i know. i just bought a new laptop and i researched to only get one with a dedicated nvidia hardware with no optimus technology to avoid the whole mess. 

the way optimus is suppose to work is you use the intel video card all the time and then you use nvidia gpu when you need to do demanding 3d but there has been some variables to how it was implemented at first the nvidia card had access to the video hardware (screens and ports) and each card could be switched on/off ( i believe this was made to work much easier by just disabling the intel gpu as needing) and i believe on the newer tech its all being passed through from the intel card to access the video hardware and the nvidia card has no direct access to any of the video ports / lcd screen on the laptop. ( going off of memory from my research)

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Kevin Thomas <axel2078@gmail.com> wrote:

I installed Fedora 18 on my Dell XPS laptop yesterday.  The installer was a bit confusing and I absolutely hate the partitioning options.  Once it was installed though, it ran fine.  I do have some minor complaints though.  The brightness controls on my laptop didn't work until I removed the "nomodeset" option from grub2. No biggie. The other thing that's really annoying is that my laptop fan is loud and spinning at full speed the entire time I'm booted into Fedora.  This doesn't happen when I boot into Windows 7 (dual-boot setup).  My battery also drains about twice as fast when booted into Fedora than into Windows 7.  I think this has something to do with my video.  I have a dedicated Nvidia chipset, but my processor also has the embedded intel video graphics.  I think I read somewhere a while ago that the Opteron function of the Nvidia chipset could not easily be turned off in Linux.  Windows only turns on the advanced graphics when needed, but Linux tries to use it all then time.  Even so, I *think* it is using the intel video for graphics.  I have tried installing the Nvidia driver several times with several Linux distros and it has always ended up with a broken boot process.  This laptop is less than 2 years old, by the way. I had to uninstall all the nvidia crap just to get the system to completely boot again. Aside from those minor quirks, it's running pretty well.

Kevin