Lenovo E595: works with some fiddling

[Matt Graham]

I got a new Lenovo E595 laptop. Getting it working with Gentoo is a 
little more involved than I expected it to be. It's a relatively new 
machine, and the older kernel on the latest Gentoo live installation 
medium is not capable of running its graphics card properly. This isn't 
really covered very well in a lot of the things I found, and I had to 
piece together the proper steps from a number of disconnected web pages. 
No search engine seems to be capable of giving installation instructions 
if you search "Linux Lenovo E595"--thanks marketers and spammers.

The most problematic part of the E595 is the Vega Picasso graphics 
card. This is a relatively new thing and requires firmware to run in 
anything but text mode. So, emerge linux-firmware or install whatever 
your distro uses as its firmware package. I had to compile the amdgpu 
module directly into the kernel, and build the "picasso" firmware files 
directly into the kernel as well. 
http://crow202.org/2019/5.1.10.config.gz for the config that I used for 
vanilla 5.1.10.

Though /proc/cpuinfo reports 8 CPUs, don't pass -j8 to make.  Compiling 
clang at some point causes multiple instances of the compiler to 
allocate over 1G, and this can hit OOM.  Make a swap file and use -j7, 
and it'll work properly.

Sound is slightly strange. The default output is not sane, and 
attempting to play/mpg123 anything resulted in segfaults. I had to put 
this into /etc/asound.conf , and then audio worked perfectly:

defaults.pcm.!card Generic_1
defaults.pcm.!device 0

Booting: Turn Secure Boot off, then install and use rEFInd.  
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Refind  I have not actually tried booting 
the 'Doze10 installation from this.  I hope I won't have to use 'Doze10 
for anything beyond shrinking its filesystem so that there was space for 
Linux.

Also note that the wireless card for this uses the r8822be module, and 
that module is in "staging", so it may not be obvious where to look for 
the darn thing. Despite being in staging, the module has worked fine for 
me so far. Wired Ethernet, USB, keyboard, and mouse are all fine as-is. 
Now I just have to wait for KDE to finish building, and things should be 
just fine.

-- 
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.