Installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Lenovo V510

I did a net install of Debian 9.1 (stretch). In the BIOS screen I turned off secure boot and set boot mode to UEFI (no BIOS compatibility). I booted the installer from a CD. The installer did not recognise the wireless LAN, so I had to use the wired Ethernet port. The installer complained about missing firmware but it could connect to the repositories and complete the installation.

The needed firmware can be downloaded with aptitude or apt-get after first booting into the new system (you need to add the nonfree section of the repositories). The needed packages are firmware-amd-graphics, firmware-iwlwifi, and firmware-realtek

After getting the firmware and rebooting, the firmware for the graphics card and the Ethernet card was found and loaded. The kernel still complained about missing firmware for the WIFI card, but it found and loaded an earlier version which works just fine. Now the card was found

$ ip address
wlp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
   link/ether 98:54:1b:76:36:3f brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

but it did not work. The culprit (after some googling) turned out to be the ideapad_laptop module, which must be removed. I added the line

blacklist ideapad_laptop

to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and after rebooting the WIFI started working

All these worked out of the box. I haven't fully tested Bluetooth, but it did find and connect to my phone.

Install dirmngr

sudo apt-get install dirmngr

then follow the instructions at launchpad.net. The device worked but I cannot use it to log in with gdm (it works for sudo, which is not particularly useful). There is likely a configuration problem related to pam which I could not fix, and do not have the time to dig into this. But the hardware is working, and maybe you have better luck with Ubuntu (the fingerprint packages are actually made for Ubuntu, not Debian).

To uninstall fingerprint, remember to reinstall the appropriate policykit, in my case for Gnome:

sudo apt-get install policykit-1-gnome
sudo apt-get remove fingerprint-gui

After I got the machine up, I experienced several instance of complete freezing (screen, keyboard, mouse) of the machine, which required poweroff/poweron to recover. It happened while reading PDFs with evince, apparently while trying to scroll the document. It also happened once during a video call.

Googling, I found several people reporting this issue, and several culprits and solutions suggested. Given the circumstances under which it happened, I suspected video card or driver problems, and I found in the ArchLinux wiki a reference to problems with the driver for the Intel graphic card. The wiki suggested disabling the 3D hardware acceleration as a workaround, which I did following their instructions. I created the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf with the following content and rebooted:

Section "Device"

  Identifier "Intel Graphics"
  Driver     "intel"

  Option "DRI" "False"

EndSection

The freezing has not occurred again since this configuration change.