1) The clicking sound could also be the hard drive. Check the SMART health for it. 2) You can get later open-source drivers by switching the Debian/Jessie. The current state of Testing is a 3.10 kernel but the proprietary drivers aren't available for it yet. You can also try switching to another .deb distro that offers later proprietary drivers like Ubuntu or Mint. These offer proprietary drivers with a 6-month release schedule so the software is more up to date than Debian/Wheezy but still fairly stable.
Thank you for the reply:1) I will check and see if I can install SMART health on my system. I made a google search and it seems like it has an RPM package. I guess I will need to compile from sources.
I tried this laptop with an Ubuntu based distribution, specifically Xubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. I was occasionally getting the similar click sounds. I think that it may be related to the Debian based kernels (I am not sure but I assume Ubuntu's kernel is related to the Debian's). Xubuntu 13.04 was even worse, it wasn't playing well with my sound card at all, the sound was occasionally going down. I may try Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 to see if there is any improvements.
I used fedora 18 and 19 for a couple of months and I didn't have the same issue. Same goes for opensuse, I used it for 6 months and I didn't have any problems.
2) I tried the open source driver with backported kernel 3.10 in Wheezy but it didn't improve. The package was linux-firmware-nonfree, version 0.39. I was ending up with a burning machine after I make a few clicks. I doubt that Jessie currently uses a better open source driver from that of the backported kernel. So, I guess if I want to go with Debian, the only choice for me is to stick to the kernel 3.2 (which is a bit old for my laptop) with closed source driver and ignore the click sounds.
I think Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 may be a better option since it comes with kernel 3.11 reportedly having a better open source driver for amd radeon graphics. But I don't like the fact that I will need to make an upgrade after 6 months. I want to use my machine as a productivity laptop.
This is the reason I am considering opensuse if I can't find a workaround with debian. Opensuse 13.1 will be an evergreen release meaning that I can keep it for almost 3 years with security updates. But I am willing to continue with Debian rather than an RPM based distro.
Any suggestions for an alternative productivity linux which can potentially play well with my laptop would be well appreciated.
Best Regards, S. Sahin