Lenovo Thinkpad W530

The Lenovo Thinkpad W530 and its associated hardware components can be difficult to configure properly in Gentoo. This article is a configuration guide to help you work out some of the details in order to get your notebook working as it should be. Do not expect to have exactly the same hardware listed in this guide in your W530. The hardware listed here is to be used as an example. Some of the components might be similar, but there are always variants in computer manufacturing.

Important Tools
These tools will help you diagnose problems if you learn how to use them properly. They are included on SystemRescueCD, which is the distribution this author recommends when installing Gentoo. Be sure to emerge them on your system after the install is complete for future troubleshooting.

eix

 * A faster and better way to search for packages. Searching with the emerge --search command is essentially the same thing as searching using the eix  command. The only difference is emerge is slower. Eix is great because it builds a cache of all installed packages on the system and serves them quickly when queried. Install eix

Then run to build the eix cache run:

Now it is possible to search for packages with:

ufed

 * A simple program designed to help you configure the system's USE flags to your liking. Start the program from the terminal by typing the ufed command. Search for the USE flag desired by pressing once and then typing the flag's name. Close the program by pressing + on the keyboard.

pciutils

 * Includes important command line tools for identifying hardware such as lspci.

gentookit

 * Includes other command line tools for identifying system hardware such as lsusb.

More tools
For more hardware detection tools see the hardware detection article.

Caching Portage in tmpfs
If you are using an SSD or HHD and you have a lot of RAM (16GB would be more than enough) you can both expand the life of your drive and speed up build time by caching your Portage temp directory completely in RAM. Be sure to adjust to the amount of memory you want to allocate. The example below allows Portage to use maximum of 10GBs of RAM (tmpfs) during compiles. You can read more about caching Portage in tmpfs by reading this article.

After has been modified, Portage's temp directory will be mounted in RAM on every boot. To mount Portage temp directory now simply run this command:

Manual Configuration
In order to build your kernel properly use the make menuconfig command to start configure your kernel:

After configuration run these commands in this order to build and install your system's kernel and modules:

Genkernel
The Genkernel tool can also be used to configure the kernel:

Unless explicitly told not to do so, Genkernel will automatically attempt to automatically configure the kernel for the system it is running on. To use a custom file or if Genkernel's automatic configuration is not needed two solutions are possible. Run Genkernel using the --no-mrproper option or modify the file's mrproper line.

Intel Graphics
If you just want to configure the integrated graphics card (Intel GPU), then this is the section for you!

Kernel
This xorg.conf can make the integrated Intel GPU work properly:

USB Device Configuration
If the default USB power saving features are bugging you they can disabled by adding a configuration file to

For more information visit kernel.org's Power Management for USB page.