I bought a brand new Lenovo Y510p 2 months back, and it arrived 2 days ago (what a speed!). Yesterday evening I finally got a chance to install Linux onto my baby. I have to say that wasn’t an easy job. Here are the steps that I did last night.
You can combine this article with that to create a more simple 1-step installation process. I have done this curly.
Firstly, boot into Win 8, using disk utility to shrink volumns [to as small as you want if you can], because my version of Y510p has an optical drive, I took the advantage and burned a Fedora 19 DVD disc, I did not use LiveCD, don’t ask me why.
If you intend to use USB to install, use liveusb-creator rather than unetbootin.
In BIOS, I turned on Legacy support with UEFI first. <-- This is important. Left the burnt DVD inside the tray, reboot and kept pressing F12 until a boot selection screen came up. Choose the DVD drive. By default, the kernel in the DVD doesn't provide a working graphics driver, so I'd have to install under command line. The Anaconda command-line was simple enough to use, the problems came next. I could successful boot using UEFI Win8 mode into Fedora, but I couldn't reach a desktop environment. Switched to tty2 using root. I tried startx but it didn't work, and the Ethernet card provided by Athores did not work either! Wifi could work, but I was at school and they used WPA2 Enterprise encryption so I couldn't do anything from this laptop! If you experience black screen on booting, add nomodeset to your grub2 kernel booting options behind linux. You can manually add this parameter to /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg.
I knew this was gonna happen, so I brought my sweet old HP 6531s alongside with me. I figured that if I update some of the packages, it might work, epsecially kernel and graphics related packages. On the Internet some people say using alx driver could install the driver for my Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet, it was a no-go for me.
I downloaded the required latest packages from http://pkgs.org, listed below:
binutils-2.23.52.0.1-8.fc19.x86_64.rpm cpp-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm elfutils-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm elfutils-libelf-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm elfutils-libs-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm gcc-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm gdb-7.6-30.fc19.x86_64.rpm glibc-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm glibc-common-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm glibc-devel-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm glibc-headers-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm kernel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm kernel-devel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm kernel-headers-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm libmpc-1.0.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm linux-firmware-20130724-29.git31f6b30.fc19.noarch.rpm mpfr-3.1.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm patch-2.7.1-6.fc19.x86_64.rpm pkgconfig-0.27.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
Using USB sticks to copy from old computer to Y510p, trying to resolve the dependency list was a great pain.
I recon the most important package is kernel-3.11* then reboot. And voila! Y510p successfully booted into my MATE Desktop Environment! Atheros ethernet was also working fantastically.
The 5400rpm hdd is noticeably slow, the booting process nearly made me think that I failed again. The brightness cannot be adjusted under MATE and I don’t know why (see the follow-up)
Proprietary GPU drive from nVidia doesn’t compile on my machine at all.
Overall, this is a success attempt installation, and it made my day!
It so happens that Linus Torvalds on Oct 17, 2013 made a comment to Fedora Project complaining on their installing DVD/CD that never gets updated after their first current-version release. I agree with him. Otherwise Fedora is great!
Update:
1. You don’t need a xorg-x11-drv-nouveau to be able to display.
2. The nVidia proprietary driver from rpmfusion won’t work yet.