Re: Debian Wheezy - HP Pavilion dm1
On 20/10/13 04:10 AM, didier gaumet wrote:
My Pavilion DM1 has a ATA TOSHIBA MQ01ABD0 (scsi) 750GB hard disk and a
Ralink RT3290 bluetooth/wireless chip. Graphic chipset is the same as yours.
I have never noted a noise (click) other than the beep during shutdown.
Lucky you, I guess mine is pretty much similar to yours, HP Pavillion
dm1 1030ca, which comes with 2xAMD E-350 Processors. I tried Xubuntu
before Debian on this machine and it was causing similar problems.
I have had sound problems in the past with XFCE that did not recognize
sound control keys and Pulseaudio that produced more or less distorted
sound until the HDMI output is deactivated.
Actually, when I installed Xubuntu 12.04, I wasn't having sound and I
ended up installing Pavucontrol and manually entering my card there. But
at least it installed pulseaudio.
With Debian Wheezy XFCE, I figured out that pulseaudio was not even
installed after my first boot, which left me without any sound. I had to
install pulseaudio separately and repeat what I did in Xubuntu 12.04.
Now I have sound working on my desktop but still, I am having warnings
about pulseaudio during startup.
I think Debian is using double standard against XFCE because I also
installed the default Gnome from Debian wheezy on this machine and
pulseaudio was installed and configured without any additional effort. I
was still having the warnings about pulseaudio though...
For the graphic card, I am using the radeon free driver. I have tested
the fglrx non-free driver provided by Debian without seeing a clear
improvement for my use, so I stick to the free driver. I have never
tested the non-free drivers provided by AMD.
I am very surprised to hear that you are happy with the free driver.
What is more puzzling is the fact that you didn't see any improvements
with your non-free install.
In my case, if I go with the free driver, my first observation is how
much heat the machine is producing. I login to my account and open my
web browser for example. After I visit a few websites possibly including
java, flash etc, I realize how much noise the fan is making. Then I
touch my hand on the left bottom part of the computer near the touchpad
and realize that the machine is burning. After I install the nonfree
driver and I repeat the same steps I observe that the computer stays
(mostly) cool and silent.
Just to your consideration, if you install the non-free driver, you will
also get extended battery life. It was the case for me. Thus, I strongly
recommend you to go with the non-free driver. But given that you are
using testing/sid, you probably won't have a chance to install it properly.
My best experience with the free driver was in Fedora 19; my laptop
stayed surprisingly cool with it but with other linux, I have a negative
experience.
Reportedly, kernel 3.11 is coming with new facilities for AMD chipsets
and they claim the computers with AMD chipsets will stay cooler and have
a better battery life, which gives me another reason to switch to
opensuse 13.1.
Mainly due to the RT3290 chipset I use Unstable|Sid rather than
Stable|Wheezy. Wireless part of the RT3290 is working from
Wheezy-Backports onward. Bluetooth part is not working yet.
When I first bought this computer, its ralink chipset was receiving no
support from any of the linux flavors except for openSUSE. With
openSUSE, I had to install the ralink driver separately as an rpm
package just like I did it with Debian Wheezy now. Furthermore, its
touchpad was only supported by openSUSE as well. These constraints made
me stick to openSUSE and use it for quite some time.
Then, Fedora, Kubuntu etc. started providing better support for this
machine and I decided to switch from openSUSE to get a better range of
packages...
Just for the bluetooth, I suggest installing Blueman applet for XFCE,
which is available in Debian Repositories. The default Wheezy XRCE
install is coming with Gnome bluetooth manager and it is not playing
well with XFCE. After installing blueman, you should have the applet
sitting in your system tray. You can remove the gnome bluetooth because
it is useless in XFCE. I am not sure if you're having a hardware problem
with bluetooth since our machines are not exactly the same.
I would rather use the Stable version of Debian on this laptop but even
the next Stable (Jessie) will probably not support bluetooth for the
RT3290 chipset.
If I go with Debian, I will stay with stable with non-free driver as
well. I opened up backports, but I am not touching the kernel update.
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