timkenhan

Hello good folks in the Lemmy Thinkpad community!

I have recently built a T420 from parts. Things have been running well. Since it's mostly from scraps, it's far from perfect, but it works.

One of my pet peeves is some discoloration along the edges and corners of the top cover. I am guessing this is the part where the paint got worn off from bumps and frictions. Is there a way to restore it? I honestly don't care about the rubberized coating, but having that consistent matte black would be really great.

I was thinking of that plastic model paint. Would it work well?

Also, the back part of magnesium chassis that's supposed to be painted black seems to have its bare color exposed.

Hopefully this is the right place to ask. Lemme know otherwise.

I got a Thinkpad W530 with Quadro K2000M GPU (Kepler). With coreboot, I was able to get around all the headaches related to Optimus only having the discrete GPU enabled.

The GPU itself is well-supported by nouveau driver, missing only a few features on the power management side of things.

Things are good when I run stuff natively. However, I have yet to figure out Flatpak. I know we use org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.* packages that are some kind of Mesa abstraction layer.

Things are much more straightforward with Intel and AMD GPU. It is actually quite easy with the proprietary NVidia driver, but it doesn't exactly come free.

The ultimate question is: Should I install one of those org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-<ver> packages with my nouveau? If so, which version?

I plan of having a maxed-out T420 for fun. Thinking that Firewire isn't particularly useful these days, but a second LAN port might. The Sub Card of T430 has a LAN port along with the USB and I was wpndering whether or not it's compatible with the T420.

Hi everyone, I've neen having this issue when running KDE wayland with multiple screen on my Thinkpad W530. I'm using the nouveau driver.

The primary monitor is fine, but the secondary one is glitching.

This is tested on Gentoo as well as Debian. I know it's not hardware issue because it runs fine on X11.

Anyone have any idea about this issue?

Edit: I should probably mention that I was using DisplayPort in the photo, but I also tried VGA and it gave the same result.

Edit1: I was able to narrow down the problem somewhat. Switching the BIOS setting to "Discrete only" for the GPU (thanks coreboot!) seems to make the glitching go away! This means the Optimus would be to blame.