Comment 35 for bug 1437386

It took me a week to get Debian Wheezy to run properly on a W541. I'll give a list of the nexesary items. Many of which should be applicable to Ubuntu. Firts of all, don't expetc to be able to boot this from a live usb any time soon. The W541 is way too new. If you wish to install, then there is hope for a working system.

1. You should disable the virtualization vt-d option in the bios
2. Bios 2.21 is unnecessary. It only provides some mitigation for the rowhammer vulnerability.
3. Booting: try the following grub command line options: nomodeset and acpi=off

nomodeset was necessary because the W541 will hang on boot until the nouveau driver is blacklisted

4. Go into recovery mode on an installed systemand blacklist the nouveau driver. Should be somethign along the lines of adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau.conf:

blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0

At this point, you should be able to boot. However, your trackpad and nvidia graphics are not going to work at this point. The synaptics driver also won't honor the bios setting to disable the touchpad portion of the device.

5. Trackpad: use psmouse imps protocol and don't use the synaptics driver. W541 trackpad is not supported as of this post by synaptics

create/edit /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf and isert the following line:

options psmouse proto=imps

After a reboot, the trackpad, touch stick, and buttons will magically start functioning properly. You just won't have the useless fancy gestures synaptics normally provides for the type of users who actually thought Windows 8 was a good product.

6. Graphics: Now this is where the horror begins. I strongly suggest you take a disk image with clonezilla at this point. It is extremely likely that you will blow up your system in spectacular ways several times before you get graphics to a workable state. So plan on reimaging a few times.

The plan of attack is to install bumblebee, nvidia refererence drivers, remove xserver-xorg-video-intel, enable multiarch, install primus and primus-lib:i386, and customize the bumblebee driver configuration to use:

# Driver=nvidia
# KernelDriver=nvidia-current

After all this, you'll need to compile intel mesa from source and install it over the mesa drivers that were installed via package manager. Yes. You read that right.

Finally for GPU switching to work, you'll need to modify /etc/default/grub:
-GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
+GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=\"!Windows 2013\""

And then update-grub and reboot

I wish you the bets of luck. I spent a week on this 8 hours/day to work out all the issues for our company laptops since we run Debian Wheezy here. Hopefully the above helps you get Ubuntu running properly. However, if this is a personal mahcine. I strongly suggest that you avoid it at all costs. Sell it on ebay or return it to lenovo and buy a model that has been around for at least a year. The W541 just isn't worth the headache. I know some users that chose instead to get a W540 and swap out the trackpad with the part from the W541 to get usable buttons. If you go that route you will save yourself alot of headache.