Hello,

I'm having difficulty getting the HDMI out jack on my new Precision 5510 to provide a video signal. I'm talking about the actual HDMI jack on the laptop, and not the port on the TB15 dock.

I spent hours over the weekend playing around with various Xorg configurations trying to hook up one of my monitors to the 5510. Aside from 1 instance where the HDMI port came on for ~5 minutes (no idea how I made it happen!), I've had no success.

I'm assuming that the HDMI jack is physically wired to the discrete Nvidia graphics card, which apparently is common now for Optimus style laptops. I did finally reach a stable Xorg setup where I have made the Nvidia card on all the time and route all display handling through it, but still, there were no signs of life from the HDMI port.

What I also tried was to create an USB live image for a Fedora Spin and try that way, as the primary distro I'm using is Arch Linux. What I found was that the Fedora USB image is set to use Nouveau instead of proprietary Nvidia blob driver, and the Fedora spin image wouldn't even boot on this laptop, due to critical issues with Nouveau.

I'm going to try some different monitors at work to ensure it's not an issue with monitors at home, although they are working terrifically with my other Arch laptop. If I have no luck with different monitors and perhaps a different Live USB, I'm going to assume the machine is defective and return it.

Has anyone else had this type of struggle getting their HDMI port on the laptop going? Any advice, recommendations or commiseration is appreciated.

-Mike