Re: Debian Wheezy - HP Pavilion dm1
On Sat, 2013-10-19 at 13:33 -0400, Sureyya Sahin wrote:
> > 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.
A multi-boot to test a few distros can't harm, however, they all use
Linux and user space from upstream, just the versions differ, some
settings differ, the structure differs, e.g. for startup some use init
others systemd and Ubuntu upstart, so solving issues by switching
distros unlikely will end up with an optimized install. You should
maintain one or two installs and customize them to your needs.
While I guess Ubuntu made some steps in the wrong direction, you're
mistaken regarding to be forced to upgrade every 6 month.
You should add security updates daily, but you don't need to make more.
12.04 LTS was released April 2012 and is supported until April 2017.
You can customize what ever Linux distro you use by several levels. Even
compiling a kernel yourself is easy to learn. It's easier to learn how
to build a kernel, than to learn commands for RPM and DEB package
management.
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