Ubuntu & other "Distros" on DV6-Quad and 6770m Discussion Page

I wanted to start a thread of how to run, and to maintain,
Ubuntu (and other Linux-ez) on the new DV6 quad
(baseline i7-2630m and Radeon 6770m).

Things I want to discuss:

1. Does it work well, if so which version (are you using?)
2. What drivers seem to work well?
3. Performance while running Linux, crashes, BSOD's
4. Do wifi, fingerprint, Webcam, SD cards work well?
5. Battery Life while using Ubuntu...
6. Feel free to mention things I didn't!

Thanks in advance to everyone, may we be of help for all to utilize!

 

Bump - I'm interested.

 

When I get my dv6 I'll write how everything works under Gentoo, might even add a .config file for the kernel.

I think the big issue will be the switchable graphics ( igp vs gpu ) and does the closed source drivers ( AMD catalyst ) works, and will it allow switching with the intel one.

 

I will be installing ubuntu the moment I get mine. Apparently, the catalyst drivers for linux work, but switching between the radeon and the on-chip intel graphics would have to be done manually. As long as they work, I don't have an immediate problem with them.

First time dealing with ati on linux, so I'm a bit skeptic. If anyone has some info/tutorials, posting would be appreciated.

 

Wow. Searched high and low to find you guys.

I'm having loads of trouble running ubuntu and I hope if we work together we can get to the bottom of most of them. Anyway, I will put together a comprehensive run down of my experience later today or tommorow but the main pitfall is the graphics switching. Other than that the wifi took some hacking but works and the bluetooth is not working. Also, fingerprint reader is a no go after some very basic attempts at getting it working.

 

Just made the partition for Ubuntu. Will install later this week...

 

I have the same machine but with the i5 processor and I could not make the ati card to run. In fact after installing catalyst 11.5 I get seg. fault on any application that uses GL libraries and also no 3d effects. I tried this on kubuntu 11.04 and now I am trying openSuSE 11.4 (installed it yesterday) but initially it seems worse than kubuntu 11.04 (menus are corrupted).

Is Catalyst 11.4 and 11.5 supposed to support switchable grahics if yes, how?

EDIT: Also windows report my card is 6770m and linux report it's 6740m, I do not wich one is my card.

 

I received my system a week back, but I'm sending it back for replacement. Some crappy manufacturing if you ask me. Audio jack is faulty, touchpad is crappy on the surface and the pointer keeps jumping around, and the power brick is shorting inside! Talk about an uber-disappointment.

@ sidster: For the fingerprint reader did you try this?: Ubuntu Unleashed: Get your fingerprint reader to work in Ubuntu

I personally haven't, but people are reporting various degrees of success with it. I'm not really that concerned with the fingerprint reader though. If it works, great! If it doesn't, not a biggie with me. I refer typing my passwords anyways. Plus, when I used it in windows, it was irritating as hell with the prompt popping up every time I visited, and even logged off from, a site. I finally deleted all accounts related to the fingers registered.

@amaj1407: Have you tried the open source drivers for ATI? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

And for the catalyst drivers, did you do all the steps in Ubuntu - cchtml.com ? Check out Hardware - cchtml.com also.

 

Will be getting mine tomorrow or the day after, and I'll be trying to install Ubuntu 11.04. I'll document this and post how it goes.

Has anyone been successful?

 

I'll be curious to see how people are doing with Ubuntu on this machine. We all know ati can be flakey on support.

 

I installed Ubuntu 11.04 successfully, but then i installed the latest ATI proprietary drivers, but after installation CCC said that didn't find any available card.

 

CCC may be saying that it did not find any available card because discrete graphics are currently disabled and you are running on the IGP.

Look at the "Envy 14 & Linux" thread. They have already done alot of work in figuring out how to get switchable graphics running on the Envy.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-envy-hdx/498550-envy-14-linux.html

 

Well got my laptop a few days ago, didn't have too much time to play with it.
swichable graphics work with the open source radeon driver ( kernel 2.6.39.x ) and mesa/ati-driver/libgrm all from git .

temp sensor works with lm-sensors 3.3.0.
the problem is that the fan is not detected correctly ( not detected at all! ).

I'm trying to see what can be done on that front.

cpu scaling : tried only the kernel cpufreq ( via /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ ), and it works just fine.

fn keys, works, volume +/- , lcd dimming, wifi on/off. I have a problem with the beats one and with the trackpad light ( it works but it has some problems, nothing major ).

Haven't tried the card reader ( don't think I will ).

if there is something else you want to know, just ask.

Cheers,
Mark Bloch.

 

What distribution did you use?

Could you please list the commands you used for installing ATI & Intel Graphics drivers e.g. sudo apt-get .....

Thanks

 

I tried out the 11.6 ATI drivers on Ubuntu 11.04 tonight. I used the instructions from Ubuntu - cchtml.com for generating a .deb.

With the 6770M, I still get a segmentation fault when running fglrxinfo and aticonfig reports that no supported adapters are present.

 

*nix does not BSOD... there is a BSOD screensaver if one feels a need for such things.

 

my 6770m is being detected as 6740 too. is this the problem why we can't install the ATI drivers? Can someone help?

 

i did a clean (format) install of Mint 11 (Ubuntu 11.04) x64 on my system and then tried to Install Catalyst 11.6 with poor results.

I updated my BIOS to F.14, what are you guys running?

Black screens on login of Mint. The cursor is there and login works, but all black... a CTL-ALT-F6 and back to CTL-ALT-F7 gets mixed results.

Might scratch the install and try again, just be certain it is reproducible crashes.

I also tried the latest Linux 3.0-rc3 kernel, it is still being detected as a 6740m.

 

I have a dv7tqe with 2 drives, so I have Windows 7 on one drive, and then partitioned the second drive for various linux distro's.

So far I'm running the 32-bit version of Mint 11, and also a 32-bit version of OpenSuse 11.4. I decided to go with 32-bit when I ran into problems with 64-bit versions of Ubuntu (10?) and even 64-bit OpenSuse 11.4.

I haven't messed with graphics, and probably won't for a long long while, but so far the two distro's above seem to be stable. (Well, I did run into a problem using wired Ethernet and failure to obtain a DHCP lease in both distros -- might have been my cable, but I found a lot of info about this problem dating back years with the RTL rev06 chipset in use.)

I'll try 64-bit again in the near future.

 

you guys with manual switching should use the gpu switching utility in ubuntu control center (ucc).

 

Just got my HP Pavilion dv6 6190sp. Can't really throw away Windows because of gamming, so stubborn as I am, tried to triple boot it for almost 10 hours: Windows 7, Ubuntu 11.0.4 and MacOS X 10.6: Total failure.

Now Im back into dual boot: Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.0.4. Went fine until I booted on and of for a few times.

Now I can't get it to boot into Graphical desktop. Command line works fine.

I got into a fight with HP because they don't know what are the bios configurations and don't let you peak in advanced mode anymore.

When I try to boot it it spews about some 20 line saying call trace and a lot of [radeon] in it.

Tried turning on and off the bios feature to control dynamic display, but get's me in the same place.

First instalation i got the latest CCC, but it screwed up my Unity, so installed it all over again, this time without the CCC. Waiting for AMD to release a new version.

 

HP told me to use the latest Bios patch: F1a, witch I am. This version allows the Display to be set to fixed instead of Dynamic.

HP tells me they can´t give me more information about the actual bios configuration, so I opened a ticket with them to get the full specs and advanced bios configuration, witch by the way is crippled on my DV6 6190sp.

 

Let's establish a few things about muxless support on Linux.

• AMD supports manual switching with Llano+Radeon through Catalyst/fglrx 11.7. A BIOS update is not needed for such machines.
• Sandy+Radeon falls within the realm of the OEM, in this case, HP. AMD is pleading with OEMs to include BIOS switches. While currently untested AFAIK, the running assumption is that Fixed Mode might work with Linux. Yet there is little understanding as to how Fixed Mode works at a hardware level.
• I know for a fact that AMD has a solution for an OEM offering Suse Enterprise. It's not clear whether such machines are Llano or Sandy.
• Open-source projects to facilitate hybrid graphics like PRIME or the X Redesign (why not Wayland?) are still months aways. Bumblebee will get Bacon support once the dev can get his hands on a laptop or more dedicated testers.

 

Hi, just registering interest. I've got the dv6 i7 with 6770m HD card. Single boot Linux Mint 11 (currently 2.6.38-11); I've tried Ubuntu 11.04 and 3.0 kernel.

Nothing much to add to the rest of the thread - I've no need to use the ATI card although it would be nice.

Current headaches are that the fan is running constantly (LM Sensors reporting 60 to 70º) so battery life is <2.5hrs, and the LCD brightness doesn't respond to the hotkeys. I use

Code:

$ xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 0.5

to change brightness which I can live with.

Looking forward to hearing any more experiences with this!

Bob

 

anyone manage to fix tearing problem with Intel HD3000?

 

You know, you can always disable some of your 8[well, 4] cores.
e.g.: To set the cpu2 into C3 [on the fly] you can run

Code:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu2/online

the same works for other cpus [1-7] as well. However, CPU0 can't
be disabled.

EDIT: Oh and yes, you can also enable the cores again... just use
echo 1 > ... [this works on the fly as well]

For the fan: Start Win 7 and enter HP coolsense Utility, there you have
to pick the "silent" mode. The new setting will be written into the
nvram, so the setting will stick across reboots.

Well, this changes the brightness alright, but the backlight will be
still 100%. With the original F06 bios, the brightness buttons work
out-of-the box. However they are broken on F13, F14 and F1A.

If you want to dim the backlight, you have to do it manually for
the time being.

Code:

echo 2000 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

Note, intel_backlight was introduced in kernel 3.1-rc3, so
if you are familiar with the procedure you can go for 3.1-rc4, if not: just wait
the "fix" is on its way.

More stuff:
- webcam works. [module: uvcvideo]
- cardreader works [module: rts_pstor]
- usb 3.0 works [module: xhci_hcd]
- WLAN worked with the brcmsmac, however I replaced the ty BCM4313 for a Atheros AR9382 module some time ago. This exchange also "fixed" the WLAN LED, it's now on [white] when the link is up.
- HP protectsmart works [module: lis3lv02d]
- The touchpad disable button and light does not work
- The switchable GFX [aka: AMD Bacon, PowerXpress 4.0] does currently not work. However the dedicated GFX can be switched-off to save power

Code:

echo "OFF" > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

(module: radeon needs to be loaded to do that)

And finally:
The white light around the touchpad can not be turned off. However
Once its done in Windows [FN+Space] the setting will stick until the
internal EC gets reboots.

 

You can, but what is the point? Those cores use very little energy unless they're actually needed. The problem is not that the system generates a lot of heat under load (this is expected and to some extent inevitable), it's that it does so when idle. This only happens in Linux -- under Windows, the fan is basically silent during light usage.

I've never had such a glaring asymmetry between Windows and Linux power consumption (and battery life) on the same machine. My guess is that it has to do with the Radeon graphics card not being switched off properly. I'm stuck with the positively ancient 2.6.32 RHEL kernel for now so I can't use the custom tools to turn it off.

I accidentally tried this early on. It works, but then the laptop gets hot. The left palm rest is almost painful to touch.

Really? For me, Fn+Space works fine to toggle the light around the touch pad. On the other hand, the red "Mute Sound" light is just plain stuck -- I think I turned it on in Windows at one point and it has never turned itself off in Linux ever since then. Mute and unmute works just fine, but the light is always red.

 

Every little bit helps. It's a small op that together with RC6, compressed FB, LVDS downclock, PCIe ASPM [unfortuatley, this one is not enabled and needs "force"] can make a difference of 27%.
Phoronix Battery tweaks

True, the radeon is worth nearly 2 h and 30 min [of calculated battery life] in my case.
With the standard HP battery [in my case, it's pretty much new] everything adds up
to a little bit over 5 hours.

Oh, the mute LED works fine in 3.1.0-rcX now. It is glowing red when MASTER or/and (SPEAKER and SPEAKER 1) are muted. Otherwise, it's off.

 

did you have any luck with osx i want to put it on mine

 

Thanks for all that info Zuviel, I feel like I've got further with this since reading it than I have in the two weeks I've had the laptop! I am just reinstalling 3.1-rc4 kernel to get the intel_backlight functionality, having tried 3.1 already hoping for a cure-all and finding no changes except the colour of the Wireless LED!

I don't have W7 however. I (prematurely, I guess) wiped it, and the recovery partitions, from the drive. Is there anything in Linux I can write the fan settings to nvram with?

In addition to your list, I'd maybe add that the jacksense only half-works. Plugging headphones in only mutes two of the four internal speakers.

 

That's odd. The WLAN LED never worked with the original broadcom 4313 card [how should it?! The brcmsmac driver does not have much led code at all, in fact it looks like it can only switch off the LED].

Not anything that I know of. The first thing would be to look if they implemented some of this temp/fan control through their Bios' WMI interface.

 

Well in the end, neither 3.1.0-rc3 and -rc4 boot. I tried recovery mode, and acpi=off, but the boot hangs with "rcu_sched_state detected stall on CPU" errors.

I thought I had a 3.1 kernel booting earlier (I tried a few) but maybe it was 3.0.

 

Thought it might be worth mentioning - I installed OpenSUSE 11.4 64bit.
I've no idea why, but powertop is showing 18w (ie more than 3hrs battery life, compared to 1.5 on Ubuntu/Mint). Fresh install, I haven't touched anything! It's using the discrete VGA adaptor.
CPU is running about 10º cooler, very little activity from the fan. LCD still doesn't respond to the brightness keys, but the default brightness/backlight seems lower.
Still not ideal but it's much more usable than it was.

 

hey guys, we could still use acpi dumps for the bumblebee project that permits gpu switching.

your intel+radeon machines aren't supported, but we have a pretty good understanding of how to support them.

To compile your DSDT and SSDTs information, install if you haven't
already the acpidump and iasl tools:
sudo apt-get install acpidump iasl
### or
sudo yum install pmtools iasl
Then run the following commands on a bash terminal:


mkdir ~/acpiinfo ; cd ~/acpiinfo
sudo acpidump > acpidump.txt
# enter password
sudo acpixtract acpidump.txt
ls *.dat | while read i; do iasl -d "${i}"; done
pid=`sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name`
name=${pid// /}
mkdir "${name}" && cp *.dsl "${name}"/
tar czf "${name}.tar.gz" "${name}"/ && ls -l "$( pwd )/${name}".tar.gz

 

I get a rather amusingly name tar file called

Code:

#SMBIOSimplementationsnewerthanversion2.6arenot?#fullysupportedbythisversionofdmidecode.?HPPaviliondv6NotebookPC.tar.gz

Do you want me to upload it somewhere?

 

well, there are multiple versions of the instructions and they're all bad because they make naive assumptions about system versions being numerical and such.

just rename to the tar to your system model

dv6-6139tx.tar.gz for example and attach here or link to mediafire or something

 

The renamed zipped tar file is attached. I was just wondering whether the dmidecode version was not sufficiently recent. Scientific Linux is a rebuilt enterprise OS and it is painfully out of date. I am seriously thinking of switching to Fedora if I can't get the GPU issue worked out (or at least turn down the thrice accursed brightness).

 

ssdt6 is very promising

the _dsm calls are pretty similar to optimus

the only question is whether -radeon or fglrx can be tricked into outputting to a fake virtualgl monitor

 

I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 by Wubi. I had to use safe mode boot to install Ubuntu, and now that it is installed, only way to make it boot is to use option --xforcevesa in Grub startup.

Is there any way out of it, and can I simply use my Intel card?

 

HP is using H2O BIOS with nothing usefull for other OSs other then Window$.

I droped the HP back at the store, just as the Quality managers from HP requested. Bought a Asus and used this link to solve all my problems: [ubuntu] How To: ubuntu natty (11.04) on asus a53s (k53sv family) - Ubuntu Forums

Good look.

 

Well it seems you can use coolsense under linux :

you need to download this :
http://aceracpi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/acer_ec/acer_ec.pl

and run :
sudo ./acer_ec.pl := 0x5B 2 #this will be quiet mode
sudo ./acer_ec.pl := 0x5B 1 #this will be cool mode
sudo ./acer_ec.pl := 0x5B 0 #default normal mode


*It seems 0x5B is stationery mode, and 0x5A is mobile mode.

I have dv6-60xx model.

I'm using the f.06 bios, the newer bios screw fn+key for me, so for the time being I'll stay with the old one.

*info is taken from here : SPCR &bull; View topic - hp dm1z undervolting and (limited) fan control

 

So, I installed Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Oncelot today. I used Wubi to install Ubuntu, and the installation went smoothly. I am a happy user now . I have been using it for about 2 hours now, and after few tweaks, the laptop works silently and cool.

After installation, I followed the comments from few posters in the thread, and used the VGASwitcheroo trick to turn off the ATI card. Then I used few battery tweaks found on this blog ... Matt's Computer Fixing: (X)Ubuntu 11.10 on the HP DV6-6023TX

I also installed the newer kernel 3.1rc9, from Ubuntu PPA by using this guide. Linux Kernel 3.0.0 installation guide for Ubuntu Linux - Ramoonus.nl

What works :
1) Brightness adjustment works by using function keys (on the new 3.1rc9 kernel)
2) sound control works
3) WIfi works out of the box on WEP networks. For some reason, my WPA2 security was not working, Maybe updating to newest drivers will do the trick.
4) Good battery life after the tweaks. The battery has lost 10% in 45 minutes, during which I was surfing on Wifi, installing few programs from App center, etc. So I should get about 3:30 to 4 hours, almost what I get on Windows.
5) Touchpad works, and two finger scroll can be enabled in preference. The backlight of touchpad can be enabled/disabled by fn+Space bar.

What does not work:
1) As for now, my ATI 6700M does not work. I don't care, as I don't game on Linux anyways. Ubuntu did offer me to install the ATI drivers, but for now I am happy using Intel onboard. Sandy Bridge is more than capable for my needs.

BTW, I have the HP DV6-6190us model, so one can look up specs for my exact config.

 

Is Unity working for you? Also, were you able to get 3D Desktop to work as well? Please advise.

 

Yep, Unity is working for me, as well as graphics acceleration. In short, everything that can be done on Intel graphics is working. I am not sure what you mean by 3D desktop, but Compiz is working as it should.

 

What's funny is that I started this tread with the intention of installing Ubuntu soon afterwards. I still have to do that, I've been so busy. But thanks to all who posted I feel that it will be really easy, I will rep all those who helped me. Like above with the Battery Tweaks.
Thanks you all

 

galadriel,

Thanks for the heads up. I have settled on Opensuse 11.4 (kernel 2.6.37.6) for now, as it seemed to give the best battery life and fan control "out of the box".
However from your info it looks like I can re-try my preferred Ubuntu or Mint again.

One question - when I have compiz enabled (using sandy bridge), I get some graphics glitches. Disappearing "I beam" cursor when typing into boxes, horizontal lines of missing pixels across pictures until I scroll them. Feels slower. So I have compiz off.
Are you noticing any of these with Oneiric?

Cheers
Bob

 

Thank God I'm not the only one....lols.


Same problem. No time to fiddle around....Can't risk my data atm, at least for another couple of months, but will get down to it one day, so the info truly is appreciated.

 

Ubuntu 11.10 (Wubi) works alright for me. Catalyst won't open even though I have the AMD drivers installed. Battery life is significantly shorter.

I used Wubi because the regular install always kills my Windows install for some stupid reason.

 

Well I couldn't wait and installed Ubuntu 11.10. Upgraded kernel to rc10. Did the grub and switcheroo mods detailed above by Galadriel. It's working great, powertop is reporting 10.6W with the backlight dimmed, none of the weird glitches in Compiz. Sound is great, (previous version of Ubuntu randomly booted without sound) I have not installed the ATI stuff.

I get a few "bad target number" errors on boot, and if the display goes to sleep on idle. I can't wake it again (have disabled it in power control). But otherwise, it's almost there.

 

I'm trying to get brightness working and to disable the radeon card on gentoo with kernel 3.2.0, to no avail.

I don't find any way to get a /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight directory. I get two acpi_backlight[01] directories (that don't change the backlight when I echo a number to their respective backlight file) if I don't specify any boot option in grub.cfg, or no directory at all if I boot with acpi_backlight=vendor. Do I need a specific module for intel_backlight? (edit) FINALLY SOLVED!. I had to compile "Lowlevel Backlight controls" BUILTIN, not as a module, IDK why. Fuck, I could've been trying for years. Now I have intel_backlight and it works (combined with acpi_backligt=vendor at boot).

I don't get a /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo directory either. I have enabled the debug filesystem, but all I see inside is: acpi bdi dri hid ieee80211 mce suspend_stats usb wakeup_sources x86. So, how can I disable the ATI card? (edit) SOLVED: I had not emerged the radeon microcode. Now I get the vgaswitcheroo directory.