Zbook 14 & Linux

Howdy folks! This post is about my experience so far with Linux on my HP Zbook 14.

I originally wanted to use Ubuntu Gnome 13.10, however after having trouble getting both the ubuntu provided AMD driver and the one directly from AMD working I decided to try out the older 12.04 LTS. The Firepro card is reported as a 8730M in Linux yet the older 13.6 Catalyst drivers are not compatible with the card. Luckily the 13.12 drivers are. I initially tried to have the driver from AMD's site try to compile a debian package for my kernel. It was able to partially work as it was properly disabling the dedicated card and running on just the integrated graphics (you can tell pretty quickly because the fan shuts off). However when trying to switch to the dedicated card the driver would just hang.

I then thought I might try a nightly build of 14.04. According to a few posts on the ubuntu forums it was supposed to have support out of the box for AMD/Intel hybrid graphics. It didn't end up working too well. The build was broken to the point that I couldn't even get it to install.. and it wiped out my Windows 8 partition along the way. Fun stuff. I noticed after a little more research that packages for the experimental driver were available for 12.04. I figured I would give it a shot before trying openSuSE and the HP provided driver. Low and behold, it worked! The driver had to be installed via the terminal (just using 'apt-get install fglrx-experimental-13') and then the aticonfig utility needs to be ran to create a new xorg.conf that is setup for the fglrx driver.

The nice thing about it is once everything is working then you can switch between dedicated/integrated easily via either the aticonfig tool or the Catalyst Control Center GUI tool. It isn't automatic, but all it needs is a logout to switch between the two. I ran the included fgl_glxgears app on both the intel card (54FPS) and the dedicated card (242FPS) so performance definitely was better using the dedicated graphics. I will have to install Steam over the weekend and try out a couple of games.

As far as other hardware goes, it has been pretty good:

Processor: no issues with high idle usage on 3.11 kernel. The performance is great and it seems to be utilizing speedstep properly to conserve battery life.

Keyboard: All hotkeys work except fn-f9/f10 for brightness increase/decrease and fn-f8 to mute the internal microphone. The fix is similar to other laptops; acpi_backlight=vendor must be passed to grub at boot. The microphone can be muted/unmuted via the audio control widget.

Audio: The internal speakers work well and are properly muted when headphones are plugged in. The internal microphone works fine for recording audio / skype. I will say that the volume of the internal speakers isn't quite as loud as what it is on Windows 8 with the HP drivers. Maybe further tweaking can help.

Network: The Gigabit Ethernet port and the 7260AN card work out of the box. The wifi hasn't dropped me so far. I am very interested in it out at a couple of coffee shops where I was having issues getting the wireless to connect in Windows 8. It does seem to report less signal strength than what Windows 8 did at similar distances, but it might just be because the driver is more accurately reporting the cards status.

Touchpad/Trackpoint: Both work very well and the gestures work great too. This is the nice thing about HP using Synaptics as I always had trouble with Alps and Elantech trackpads going haywire under linux. And yes, I do mean haywire. To the point that the cursor starts jumping around madly and randomly clicking everywhere!

Noise/Heat: With the proprietary AMD driver installed the machine is as quiet as it is under Windows. It does seem like it is running a bit warmer but this might be due to the fact that Chrome seems to use a bit more processor cycles under linux than it does under Windows 8.

SD Card Reader: The card reader works fine out of the box. Speeds are great, around 30MB/s with my class 10 card.

External Video: I only have an LCD with DVI/VGA right now and I do not have a Displayport->DVI adapter, so I have only tested the VGA port so far. It seems to work ok. I can set it to clone the laptop lcd and then shut the lid of the laptop and it shut off the laptop display without going to sleep. This works pretty well as a desktop setup with an external keyboard and mouse. I will eventually buy a dock and a monitor with Displayport so I can test that too.

I think that covers everything for now, if anyone has any questions feel free to ask!

 

Thanks for your impressions.

How fairs the battery life?

 

The battery life seems pretty good. About 4-5 hours with moderate use. The numbers aren't as good as it is in Windows but the slice battery is a relatively cheap way to bump it up to 10 hours which surpasses most other options out there.

Unfortunately, the external monitor is not quite as stable as I originally thought it was. Trying to setup different modes than mirroring ends up causing some pretty bad glitches in the AMD driver. The internal LCD ends up being disconnected until I restart X. The problem crops up with both the AMD card enabled or the Intel card enabled. Also if you force the external display to be the primary with the internal shut off it sets the clock speed of both the Intel card and the AMD card to 200mhz, which causes the entire UI to run very slow until you restart X.

It does seem to be stable if you never use an external display, but one of the nice things about this laptop is it can be used as a desktop replacement with multiple external monitors. Eventually I plan to have two 2560x1440 external displays via displayport on the dock, but I am not sure if such a configuration can work under Linux. Hopefully the driver situation can improve a little if that is where the problem is.

Oh, and I did try a couple of different drivers too. The 12.04 fglrx-update driver is compatible with this card so there is no need to use the experimental one.

 

By "internal LCD ends up being disconnected", do you mean it goes black? If yes, try turning up back light brightness.

 

Just a word of caution... I've just tried to connect a Dell U2713HM via the display port connections on the dock, and I can't get it to do more than 1920x1080. If I connect it directly to the laptop then I can get the full resolution. I'm currently just using the radeon driver so may try the catalyst 13.12 as you described above, but I think it's more likely to be a problem with the cable, as described here:

HP ZR2740w and HP Folio 9470m / UltraSlim Docking ... - HP Enterprise Business Community

Cheers

 

I would definitely suggest trying the Catalyst driver. It actually has three different options on the hybrid graphics - Integrated (Power Saving), Dedicated, and Dedicated with external display's. I think the third option would be the best bet for getting the ports on the dock to work.

Micro Center has those ZR2740w's for $400 each. It would be great to pick up a pair of them for usage as a desktop workstation if this graphics driver would just be stable. Almost makes me wish they would have offered it with a K610m option or something. The Nvidia cards seem to work better under linux than ATI from what I can tell.

Edit: Oh, and when the internal LCD becomes disconnected. It is completely gone, as the display isn't recognized anymore by either the ATI command line tool or xrandr. If you log out, the driver resets and it is detected again. I wonder if it has something to do with how Ubuntu detects displays? Maybe using something like Suse Linux (which should be supported) would work better? I will have to play with it again once work slows down.. In the meantime a VM hosted by Windows 7/8.1 Pro still seems to be the most reliable configuration for this laptop..

 

Cool - I'll give it a go and post back any results. Probably won't get a chance until next weekend though.

 

I tried the last Catalyst (beta) driver in Debian sid this week, but like others with older versions, I weren't able to switch back to IGPU (3D applications segfault). I ended up going back to not using the fglrx driver and stay on the hd4400.

Oddly, testing a simple game like Ricochet (yes, the ugly one, but fast to download) under the M4100 seemed slower than with the HD4400. I didn't dig much, as I kept Windows for small games, knowing the under performances of AMD drivers on Linux...

 

Checking the temp sensors with SpeedFan or the SYS filesystem under Linux, I see that one sensor always report 114°C (Temp2). The other sensors are correct, while the 5th is disabled (0°C). Anyone else has this weird value?

For the gamers, playing L4D2 in FHD mode works flawlessy with the AMD FirePro M4100.

 

I didn't have an exact measurement for temps, other than it seemed warmer than under Windows 8.1 while idling. I agree that the performance is pretty good with the firepro. I only had trouble while using an external display in combination with the graphics switching. If you never intend to hook up an external display, it will probably work fine.

 

This isn't the only bug from the display part. From multiple zbook, I have noticed that the sleep mode end up on a crash/reboot during wake up. Deep sleep works though. The error code is 0x000000113, and seems related to Intel driver. It does that under Win 7 and 8(.1). I found from another forum that might be due to a driver update from Windows Update released during January...

Memory sleep works flawlessly under Linux. So that's definitely a software bug.

About Linux, the Wifi button seems to trigger a WMI event. It's not yet registered in the hp-wmi driver, but I guess it could be mapped quite easily to a KEY_WLAN event.

 

Just a couple of quick updates. The video driver issue is definitely related to the switchable graphics. I picked up an Elitebook 850 as well, which only has the Intel HD4400 card, and it works perfect. The 850 also gets about two hours more battery life as well, which kind of confirms to me that the AMD card isn't completely powered down (or atleast as far down as it goes in Windows). It runs much cooler in Ubuntu as well than the Zbook, although that might be because it is a larger footprint.

I would also like to note that efi booting works on these machines! Just install with EFI enabled, Ubuntu should set everything up with an EFI partition, or use the existing one if you are dual booting with Windows 8. Then, after it is done, go into the bios and create a "Custom Boot" type on the Boot options page. Type "\EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi" into the box and save it. I also bumped the priority of this one up above the "OS Boot Manager" option as it seems to cause the machine to halt if it doesn't find a Windows EFI boot image there. It works pretty well, and shaves a few seconds from booting. With an SSD, I can be from cold boot onto the Ubuntu desktop in about 9 seconds.

 

The laptop I have at work, at Dell Latitude 5530 (which I wouldn't particularly recommend), does the same thing with the internal LCD becoming disconnected, although in that case the trigger is resuming from hibernate, and it doesn't always happen. Rebooting will fix it, and once hibernating and un-hibernating again fixed it; I hadn't thought to try logging out. But that laptop is running Windows 7, and has Intel video drivers (which, given Intel driver reputations, could be related to the problem, but have been updated). So, though it seems to be a rather unusual problem, it isn't just limited to your Linux + ATI drivers config. I read recently on Wikipedia that the VGA standard (I'm also using VGA) was not designed to support hot-swapping back in 1987, despite the fact that everyone treats it as if it does, and that can occasionally have undesirable side effects, so perhaps what we're seeing is one of those corner cases. It is rather annoying, though - my personal laptop (in sig) never did have that problem, and I know I've hot-swapped it with VGA numerous times. It could also be a hardware issue, in my case either with the laptop itself, or possibly with the external monitor I have at work. Or even with the VGA cable, for that matter.

You mention that you've also run the ZBook with Windows 7/8.1; does it ever do that when running Windows?

I'm glad the juxtaposition of someone with the name win32asmguy making a review of how Linux did on a laptop made me take a look at this thread, even though I don't plan to buy a ZBook.

 

Note that the HP ZBook SD Card Reader can also work on old Ubuntu versions (or kernels), but it is needed to adapt the old source code of the rts5229 driver ( Realtek).

The ZBook card reader type is rts5249 (not rts5229).

I modified the rts5229 source code:

1) In the file "Makefile": "TARGET_MODULE := rts5229" ---> "TARGET_MODULE := rts5249"

2) In the file "rtsx.c": I added my sd card reader (0x5249) in this structure:
static struct pci_device_id rts5229_ids[] = {
{ 0x10EC, 0x5229, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_CLASS_OTHERS << 16, 0xFF0000 },
{ 0x10EC, 0x5227, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_CLASS_OTHERS << 16, 0xFF0000 },
{ 0x10EC, 0x5249, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_CLASS_OTHERS << 16, 0xFF0000 },
{ 0, },
};

make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe rts5249

And now the SD Card reader works on Ubuntu 10.04!!!

Wifi, Ethernet and sounds work on Ubuntu 10.04 too, after some backport driver installations,

Probably, the rts5229 driver can be modified for other Realtek SD card readers...

François

 

(... and the old version of the rts5229 driver can be downloaded here: Realtek).

 

For Zbook laptop with Kx100m card, the last nvidia drivers can be installed. The driver installation scripts can be downloaded from the nvidia web site. It is required to disable the hybrid graphics option in the BIOS.

xbacklight can also be used to change the screen brightness.

François

 

That is good to know. Have you been able to determine battery life with integrated graphics disabled? Makes me wish we had some kind of Maxwell quadro card in this, if the power savings could get it within just a couple of watts of what consumption is with the integrated card, honestly we wouldn't even need integrated switching.

Actually on that note, have you found any bios option that lets you completely disable the NVidia card and only operate on the intel graphics? Apparently this used to exist for the Dell Precision series, and a couple of folks running haswell Precisions have gone so far as the remove the dedicated card entirely.

 

On my Zbook 17, I did not see this type of options. With Ubuntu 10.04, the Intel graphics card is the only card recognized by default (if the nvidia driver is not installed and if the hybrid graphics option is not disabled). In this case, I suppose that the watts consumption of the Quadro card is limited (because this card is not used), but the display was very buggy when I used the Intel card on Ubuntu.

With the Quadro card, the battery life is approximately 2h30 with Wifi enabled. I have two SSDs. I suppose that the battery life would be shorter with traditional hard drives.

 

I had a similar experience with the Zbook 14 and the AMD card. If I ran the intel card without the AMD driver installed then the intel driver seemed buggy, especially when managing the internal display. However with the Elitebook the experience is much better - the internal display always comes back when changing monitor configurations and sleeping/resuming. I can only guess that the AMD card hooks into the management of the internal display and without the driver present to control it, some state is being lost when a power or monitor detection related event occurs.

That 2h30m battery life sounds about right. The Zbook 14 seems to get about 4-5 hours of life with the AMD driver installed and set to integrated only (power saving) mode. The elitebook gets 5-6 hours with a slightly larger screen and just the intel card, same 50W battery. This really leads me to believe that the best HP notebook for linux is going to be the Elitebook, configured without a graphics card. It is far more stable, less hassle to get running out of the box, and from what I can tell will always be more power efficient than the hybrid graphics solution.

I will note that I finally bought a docking station (the slim, 2013 one, D9Y32AA) which works perfectly under linux. The display ports on the dock work great so far, using DP->DVI adapters. All of the other ports seem to be pass through and work perfect. The HD4400 card can drive up to three displays at the same time, up to 3200x1800 each on the display ports, and either the interal LCD @ 1920x1080 or VGA. The speed of the internal card improves greatly if you are using dual-channel memory, so definitely grab a second stick or a 16gb kit if your machine only came with one. Even the 2D desktop speed (dragging windows around, etc) is much better with the second stick of ram.

My only real issue left to sort out is to get the backlight to remember what level it is at, as adding acpi_backlight=vendor causes ubuntu to no longer save the brightness level of the internal display. It is either 100% (from a cold boot) or 0% (from re-enabling after being disabled).

 

Same here for the brightness.

About the AMD card, I have no issue without the AMD driver. In fact, I had some with it, being unable to run on the IGP due to a crash when using composite/3D mode). I "use" the free radeon driver, with the card in standby state. 4-5 hours is a fair bet. The laptop draws around 7 to 9 W (can be seen using powertop or /sys files with the simple P(W)=U(V) x I(A) formula).

 

Ah, I am been using the binary driver from AMD. If the free radeon driver supports the card then that would probably be even better. Looking at the radeon wiki I can see that 7750m (Cape Verde) is supported so it wouldn't suprise me if 8750m (Mars) was as well.

The Elitebook 850 also draws about 9W in powertop, and gets the same 5-6 hours of battery life.

I have discovered an issue with the docking station under linux. If I try to hook up two monitors via the dock displayports, they end up showing up as a single connected monitor. These are using DP->DVI adapters, so that might be the cause. I don't have Windows anymore, other than in a VM, so I can't really test it there. I borrowed two identical 17" 1280x1024 monitors, and actually got a mode of 2560x1024, tried it and it worked. I don't know if the same will work with two 1920x1080 (as 3840x1080) but if it does it could be acceptable. Unfortunately this messes up the Window snapping functionality that X supports which I do like to use. I wonder if the dock is only fed a single displayport 1.2a connection and then splits that signal for each of the ports on the dock. In theory a driver for windows could manage this to make it transparent to the user.

 

Hi win32asmguy, I just bought a Zbook 14 and I installed Ubuntu 14.04.1, this is my principal SO, all works very good out of the box, but in graphics just detect the intel 4400, can you advise me how can I do to work the AMD Fire Pro? Thank you

 

You likely already have the open source radeon driver working via vgaswitcheroo. Try launching a 3d app like this:

Code:

$ DRI_PRIME=1 glxgears

It should be noticeably faster. If you need more performance or a better opengl stack, you can install the fglrx binary driver from AMD. Just using the ubuntu fglrx restricted package should work, or you can even compile the one from AMD's site on 14.04 if you want. With the binary AMD driver you have to logoff to switch between the cards. It also may be less stable with regards to suspend support and external display support.

Lately I have switched to the Zbook 17 with an Nvidia K3100m. It seems to be the best mobile workstation machine for Linux if you want to be able to use a dock and external displays. It does weigh quite a bit more than the Zbook 14 and Elitebook 850 but the processor and video card are about three times faster while running much cooler. Even though it only has a single cooling fan it has to be one of the largest I have seen in a notebook, which really helps it move air while staying quiet.

I will also say this: if you are serious about using it for work under linux, consider getting a Redhat 6 developer subscription, or possibly a Suse 13 Enterprise subscription. Both of those OS's are supported on the Zbook series and have drivers for the video card available from HP, so it will likely be the most reliable way to go.

 

Hello,
first post here, so hope not to break any rule.
I got myself a ZBook 14 and I'm using it with Ubuntu 14.04 (14.04.1 right now). Everything works quite fine (wifi, ethernet, card reader, bluetooth) out of the box.

I have a major problem with the video drivers and external monitor set up to extend the desktop (if I only use the laptop screen, no problems).
The open-source drivers and the closed ones (installed through the proprietary drivers windows) are acting extremely funny and with various results, but never working as expected.
After connecting an external monitor (either VGA or DP), the problems are:
- the desktop becomes completely black, no wallpaper, only unity and indicators bar, and no response to hotkeys (like the "window" button to open the menu). But both screens shows the correct resolution and bars are placed correctly. This is the best I can get.
- the desktop becomes completely black, no wallpaper, only unity and indicators bar, and no response to hotkeys (like the "window" button to open the menu). The desktop is shown in the middle of the two combined screens (as if, in a normal situation, you place a program window in the middle, having one part in one screen, and the rest in the other screen), while the mouse acts as if the desktop is placed correctly on the left monitor.
- mixed situations of the above ones, also showing the default wallpaper tiled in strange ways.

Another issue, always related to the video drivers, is that every time I suspend the laptop and wake it up, the configuration of the screens get lost, and I end up having a duplicate desktop at low resolution on both monitors.
I tried to use the AMD control center to switch between the Intel card and the AMD one, but I get the best situation (the first one) only if I use the Intel card.
I searched online, but failed to find something similar.
The funny thing is that the log-in screen works perfectly (correct placement on both screens, wallpaper shown, log-in input box shown only on one screen)

Have you experienced anything like this? Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance

 

Hi,

I fear the dual GPU is not something that is very stable right now. I kept GPU auto-switch on under Windows, but I don't use the ATI card under Linux. I only use the Intel integrated GPU. Unless you try to do complex 3D stuff, it will do the job with less power (full HD video acceleration, openGL desktop, ...) For the ATI driver, I use the open source version, as it can power off the card automatically when it sees that you use the Intel GPU.

Never tried to put it in sleep while the external monitor was connected.

The only time I tried the proprietary ATI driver, I wasn't able to switch back to the intel GPU. My desktop was composite (E17), and any 3D call was ending by a segmentation fault...

 

Are you using a 2013 Ultraslim dock with it or just the displayport / vga connectors directly on the laptop? If you are using the dock make sure to install any firmware updates available for the MST hub first (this can only be done from Windows). The MST hub is only supported on kernels 3.17 right now, so you would ideally need to be use a few experimental packages to get it to work under Ubuntu right now. There is an effort going on to get official support backported to 14.10 and even 14.04 but that is probably a few months away at least.

If you are using the connectors directly on the laptop, consider upgrading to Utopic or installing a 3.16+ kernel + xorg amd / intel drivers. HP recently went through the process of getting many of their notebook lines certified for preinstall of 14.04LTS, so in theory 14.10+ should have those fixes incorporated. The biggest problem I had using mine that way was that the displays would be properly detected, but would have random artifacts as windows and the mouse would move around on them.

 

Thanks a lot for the answers.

Directly on the laptop.

I guess I'll survive for now with the LTS and wait for the next upgrade, I'm not in the mood of reinstalling everything (main goal was to have a stable working machine and use only LTS releases).

Maybe I'll do some more tests with both open and closed source drivers and report bugs in case, hoping they will be fixed for the LTS.

 

If you haven't already I would suggest trying the updated proprietary driver from AMD directly. Ubuntu doesn't have it in their package management system, but AMD does support it and I have heard of a few people over on the Ubuntu Forums who use it fine.

AMD 14.9 Linux Driver

Ubuntu Trusty AMD Driver Installation Guide

I would suggest following the steps in the install guide for the manual install "STABLE" version. With any luck the fixes that HP made for Zbook 14 / Elitebook 840 / Elitebook 850 have been rolled up into this generic driver!

 

I tried to install the AMD 14.9 Driver as you suggested, but for now no improvements, same as before.

Another weird thing is that, from the AMD page, if I look for the specific driver for my graphic card (AMD FirePro M4100), I get this page: AMD FireProâ„¢ Mobility Driver
The driver it suggested (AMD Catalyst Pro), although, doesn't install itself (the procedure is equal to the normal driver), blaming that my graphic card is not supported!
I suspect that it detects the Intel HD4400 and thinks it's the only card, otherwise I really don't understand why it shouldn't work.
I tried to install it with the "--force" option and it completes the procedure, but after rebooting, I'm welcomed by a black screen and a warning message that says that my display adapter wasn't recognized

 

That is unfortunate. It is also why I didn't keep the Zbook 14 myself. It worked fine as a laptop, but trying to use it as a workstation at a desk was too much of a battle with the hybrid graphics setup.

On a different note, I recently acquired a Clevo W740SU. I have always been curious about this machine ever since it was released last year. The Iris Pro GPU is really something else. Full open source driver support, very fast speed even when hooked up to multiple WQHD external displays, and great power management when you want to use it as an laptop. I really wish Dell, HP or Lenovo would build a machine on this processor. It doesn't even need a dedicated GPU. Business quality build quality and support for something like this would make it sell like hotcakes.