HP Pavilion dm1z and Linux

Hi, all.

I am still waiting for HP dm1z to come to Russia, but it actually looks like a good machine. My main concern is Linux compatibility (specifically Ubuntu or OpenSuSE).

Can anybody answer me these questions:

• I have googled some issues with wifi under Ubuntu 64 bit. Do they also appear under 32 bit?
• Are the drivers ready ATM?
• What GPU performance do you get? Can you watch 1080p? What about YouTube?
• Can you control the fan under Linux? I heard that by default the fan is pretty noisy unless you turn it down. Is it possible in Linux?
• What battery time do you get?
  
  
  
  
  

I would also like someone to tell me about the performance. I don't run heavy apps, but I multitask a lot. I like KDE, and I want to use it. I often run a web-browser (Opera) with 15-20 tabs opened, a messenger (kopete), a mail client (Kmail) and several documents (1-2 docs files, may be one PDF in Okular) simultaneosly. I also run Amarok and Ktorrent in the background. Can I do that with Zacate?

 

I am running Debian (sid), so your mileage may vary with other distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE. I also have only had the laptop since Monday (4 days), so my opinion is still in flux.

My laptop has the Ralink RT5390 card. Support for it was added to the rt2x00 git repository back in late February, but it did not seem to make it to Linus' tree before the feature freeze for 2.6.38. This means that unless your distribution's packagers have added it, the wireless probably will not work without extra configuration. After significant pain trying to compile a kernel with support for it, I eventually found a post on the Ubuntu forums advising grabbing the source from an OpenSUSE package that incorporates the drivers available for direct download on Ralink's website and applying patches to them. This worked wonderfully.

I assume the in-kernel drivers will be included with 2.6.39.

Debian sid's current kernel is 2.6.37. Looking through the changelogs for the 2.6.38 release candidates, there seem to be several changes specifically focused on this laptop. My laptop boots and runs fine with both kernels, but the former seemed a bit more unstable (inconsistent screen corruption at random times, the computer not recognizing when the AC adapter had been unplugged, etc.). I would use 2.6.38 if at all possible at this time.

Hibernate does not seem to work for me. Suspend is iffy, but inconsistent enough that I have decided to not use it for a while.

YouTube is fine. I have been able to get normal acceleration/direct rendering with both the open source radeon drivers and AMD's fglrx. Video playback with the radeon drivers leaves much to be desired (dropped frames on almost everything). fglrx has smooth 720p playback, but 1080i is choppy.

The fan is noticeable, but not as bad as some other commentators have suggested. I think there is an option in the Advanced menu of the BIOS to enable ACPI fan control; I have not turned it on, though (some extra whirring in exchange for a guarantee that my laptop will not overheat seems like a good deal to me).

I have not run it down fully (so this is highly inaccurate), but gnome-power-manager suggests 6 hours.

I have not run KDE since 2003, and so can not comment on its memory requirements. I run a similar workload in GNOME, though (albeit with less tabs in Chrome and no Bittorrent), and am finding the laptop okay for day-to-day use.