Installing Ubuntu on my Nvidia RTX2060 Laptop (Lenovo Legion Y7000SE)

Procrastinated for three years, I finally decided to buy my very first "first-hand" computer. ~~Now I am bankrupted.~~ I got it from the school's notebook ownership program which is rather worth it given the OP spec. With just 12000 HKD, I got 1TB SSD, Gen 9 i7 intel CPU core, Nvidia RTX 2060, 32GB RAM, HD screen, as well as a gigantic power supply yay~. As a ~~professional~~ IT dog, the very first thing I need to do is to install linux dual boot on it, but it has been cries and tears doing so. Took me several days TAT.

1. Install Nvidia Driver

I cant directly install from desktop images as it will enter a broken screen as the computer don't have Nvidia driver at fresh install.

Therefore I install ubuntu by first installing a ubuntu server, install the Nvidia driver manually, finally install the desktop.

During the installation wifi seems not working so I connect the computer with LAN.

# the repository that nvidia is
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
 
# dynamic kernel module support
sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential
 
sudo apt-get update
 
# know what is the newest version of nvidia driver
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-drivers
ubuntu-drivers list
 
# install the driver
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-440

Then install a desktop distro. ~~I chose KDE because the desktop looks like win10, and I just joke with my non linux friends that it is win11 and they really believe in it~~.

sudo tasksel

This will display a list of available desktops that you can install

After installing, just reboot

reboot

2. Brightness control

And then brightness setting is not working

First need to enable brightness control of the GPU. Open /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf (or maybe other file like this in the same directory) and add a line of

Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Everytime after you update the nvidia driver, you need to manually add back the above line.

Then ubuntu don't know it can control the lower level setting of computer. So to enable the OS to set the low level stuffs, set the grub by modifying a line in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=linux"

Remember to sudo update-grub and then restart. You may now test the brightness control with xbacklight -set 10 or brightness control buttons on your computer if you have.

3. Cannot connect to WIFI

Do this after you have installed desktop

First switch the netplan to use NetworkManager

cd /etc/netplan
 
# Optional: backup the setting
sudo cp 01-netcfg.yaml 01-netcfg.yaml-backup
 
# edit the netplan
sudo vi 01-netcfg.yaml

Change the "ENTIRE" 01-netcfg.yaml as follows

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# For more information, see netplan(5).
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: NetworkManager

sudo netplan generate
sudo netplan apply
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

The story hasn't ended yet. idk why i dont need these for the first attempt. For each start up, you need to run these

#!/bin/sh -e
sudo modprobe -r ideapad_laptop
sudo rfkill unblock all
exit 0

If you don't have rfkill, install it by sudo apt isntall rfkill

If you don't want to run it every time manually, you can put them as /etc/rc.local

sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local

4. Chinese input

Installing Chinese in KDE is such a headache, and the input method itself is much less user friendly than that in win10. ~~But never mind when programming who use Chinese.~~

First install Chinese language pack

sudo apt install language-pack-zh-hant

Then check whether zh-tw something like that is in your locale by running

locale -a

Next install ibus. I have not successfully tried other input libraries. ibus claims itself as new and user friendly but nah...

sudo apt install ibus ibus-clutter ibus-gtk ibus-gtk3 ibus-qt4
sudo apt install ibus-cangjie  # I use cangjie
im-config -s ibus # ibus official docs said it is im-switch which is wrong
ibus-setup
 
sudo apt-get install gnome-icon-theme # poor KDE people need this idk why

add this to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or you cannot use ibus in some app

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus

Finally log out and log in again will have it done :)

If the language box is not on the toolbar, run this

ibus-daemon -drx

I also want to share some part of the hard drive for windows, rule of thumbs

Always save shared documents in NTFS partition
Need to disable fast boot in windows and dont boot to linux when window is sleeping

And then in linux mount the drive (for me linux directly auto mount C: to /media/storage/), and symlink the folders in home directory to the shared drive (I just remove ~/Documents/ ~/Pictures/ etc and make some symlink that point to C:\Users\xxxxxx\Documents whatever in ~/)

One interesting thing is I am even able to share the VirtualBox VMs across linux and windows.

Set up the VM in windows environment
Add the VM in Linux environment
1. Press Ctrl+A
2. Open myVirtualMachine.vbox in NTFS partition
3. Done

6. Broken nvidia driver after updating bios

After I had update my bios, my entire nvidia driver breaks and back-light control is not working. My eyes hurt! (Takes me a whole night and morning to get it solved T^T)

What I did is update the nvidia driver

But then the driver is installed but not running, you can tell by

# you will see a list a nvidia packages you have installed
dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia
 
# you will see nvidia-driver is actually not running
nvidia-smi

What i did is just uninstall and then install all the nvidia related packages listed in dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia, and then install the newest nvidia driver by the steps at #1.

And then I run https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1037160 again, it shows something like this

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.26       Driver Version: 440.26       CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce RTX 2060    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   50C    P8     7W /  N/A |      0MiB /  5926MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

None of the processes are using the GPU, if I run nvidia-settings , it saids cannot connect to Nvidia driver whatever.

What I did is review the debug log, which is generated by nvidia-bug-report.sh , I see something like this

nvidia-modeset: Version mismatch: nvidia.ko(440.26) nvidia-modeset.ko(435.21)

To solve this, I removed nvidia-modeset.ko and reinstall all nvidia related packages

sudo rm /lib/modules/4.15.0-36-generic/updates/dkms/nvidia-modeset.ko

I changed 4.15.0-36-genericto something else, anyway it should be changed to the newest one

After I setup the brightness control again in #2, my eyes are saved! Run nvidia-smi I can see desktop processes are actually using the GPU, and nvidia-settings can open a normal dialog.

#> nvidia-smi     
Fri Nov 29 08:20:51 2019       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.26       Driver Version: 440.26       CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce RTX 2060    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   50C    P8     7W /  N/A |    343MiB /  5926MiB |      3%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      2483      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           129MiB |
|    0      3186      G   kwin_x11                                      65MiB |
|    0      3207      G   /usr/bin/krunner                               3MiB |
|    0      3209      G   /usr/bin/plasmabash                          80MiB |
|    0      3314      G   /usr/bin/systemsettings5                      37MiB |
|    0      3497      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_archivemail_agent            13MiB |
|    0      3548      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_mailfilter_agent              3MiB |
|    0      3574      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_sendlater_agent               3MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+