Jul 25, 2013

How To Configure A Lenovo Thinkpad T530 With Docking Station For Dual Monitors in Ubuntu

At my day job I have a pretty awesome Lenovo T530 laptop, and up until yesterday I was running Windows 7 on it. I decided to install Bauer-Puntu 13.04 on it instead, and for anything Windows related I would use Remmina to RDP to a server, or use a Windows 7 VM in Virtualbox.

By default the T530 has Nvidia Optimus enabled in the bios which is great for Windows 7 or Windows 8, but it doesn't work so well in Ubuntu. I have read where people had success using Bumblebee to make Ubuntu play well with it, but I didn't have any luck. So this is how I got dual monitors to work for me

  • Switch to discrete graphics mode in your bios



  • Install the latest Nvidia drivers from the Ubuntu repositories

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
  • Edit your grub config and append nox2apic after "quiet splash"

    sudo nano /etc/default/grub

    Change

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"


    to:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nox2apic"


  • Update grub

    sudo update-grub


  • Reboot
After I did that I was able to go into the Nvidia X Server Settings and setup  my screens to use TwinView.


Did you get it to work a different way? Were you successful with Bumblebee? If so, what did you do differently? Let us know in the comments.



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