HP, SLED and an annoyed Fedora user

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#1

Hi all,

I’ve been playing and using RH products until now.
I bought a HP ProBook 4740s laptop with preinstalled SLED 11 last year, got impressed by how good the HP-tweaked SLED worked on it and then installed Fedora with encrypted /home and /data partitions.
All good until I got fedup with the lack of possibility to switch between Intel and ATI video cards and the poor performance of Virtual Box on my lappie even if it has i7 CPU and 6Gb RAM (will be upgraded to 8 this week).

The 14.6 official ATI driver for linux does not recognize my video card so instalation fails. Even on Windows seems that the only driver that allows switching between the 2 gpus is the one provided by HP.

What I want is:

  • best performance for virtual machines - might switch to QEMU if it supports snapshots / base VMs (vmWare Workstation is too expensive and the Player lacks these options)
  • the possibility to switch between Intel and ATI card based on power profile or some other global setting (looking forward for linux games from gog.com :slight_smile: )
  • latest versions for Firefox, Thunderbird, GnuCash, LibreOffice, development tools (Eclipse, Oracle JDK, Nodejs) and good support for multimedia
  • encrypted partitions
  • KDE or a lighter gui than KDE and Gnome or Gnome 3 but not the ugly Gnome from SLED (not a must but a nice to have)

I’m contemplating at 2 solutions:

  1. install openSUSE 11, install drivers provided by HP and then upgrade to openSUSE 13 (still have doubts that the drivers will work on new kernel version).
  2. restore SLED 11, redo and encrypt desired partitions, activate license, update to latest (hopefully it will bring some updated packages for FF and LibreOffice) and then use openSUSE repos for the needed updated applications (and continue SLED subscription).

I’m not familiar with the SUSE ecosystem so I’m not sure which one is most appropriate to get what I want (even if both involve leaving RH). I restored SLED on a new Seagate SSHD drive, played a little with parititioning and got angry of not beeing eble to mount my Fedora encrypted ext4 partitions (doesn’t seem to know ext4?)

Thanks

#2

I also bought the same HP ProBook 4740s notebook with SLED 11 last year. I like 17" notebooks.:wink:

First I formated the whole disk and put there Fedora 19 (actual at that time). I was also sad about not switching graphics Intel/AMD. There was also quite annoying fan noise, heating and poor battery life.
Everything changed after issuing kernel 3.13. Suddenly any heating, fan noise and it is not problem to work more than 4 hours on battery.

Now I am on openSUSE Tumbleweed. And I am quite satisfied now.

Conclusion. You need kernel 3.13 and higher.

#3

I haven’t noticed issues with the fan, heat or poor battery on Fedora 20 but the mainboard did fail in the first year and got it changed on warranty (glad I had my partitions encrypted :smiley: ).

Do you use the HP video drivers on your openSUSE distro? Do they work on higher kernel versions that the one in SLED 11?
Have you installed SLED and then changed the repos to Tumbleweed or have you installed openSUSE 11? 13?
Does openSUSE Tumbleweed support KVM/QEMU for virtualizing?

Thanks

#4
  1. I does not use any HP video driver. I use only that ones in distribution. For me it is enough.
  2. There was not any SLED in one hour after buying notebook.:slight_smile: I made full HDD format and put Fedora there that time.
    openSUSE Tumbleweed was installed via actual openSUSE 13.1. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed
  3. I prefer VirtualBox so I do not know much about functionality of KVM/QEMU.:frowning:
#5

On 2014-07-15 08:46, savornicesei wrote:

> Have you installed SLED and then
> changed the repos to Tumbleweed or have you installed openSUSE 11? 13?

You can not do that.

Well, you can, but don’t expect it to properly work - LOL!

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

#6

VMware can be find for free just google vmware/linux/torrent
SLED versions you can find (free and legal for testing) at the NOVEL sites
You can also try openSUSE13.1x64 live KDE (or GNOME versions) and prepare a usb disk for booting
Finally i don t know what you find at RH derivatives,perhaps its just a matter
of time to get used to SUSE
I only have a lenovo laptop and i cant help you more

#7

On Mon, 21 Jul 2014 08:26:01 +0000, dimistat71 wrote:

> VMware can be find for free just google vmware/linux/torrent SLED
> versions you can find (free and legal for testing) at the NOVEL sites
> You can also try openSUSE13.1x64 live KDE (or GNOME versions) and
> prepare a usb disk for booting Finally i don t know what you find at RH
> derivatives,perhaps its just a matter of time to get used to SUSE I only
> have a lenovo laptop and i cant help you more

To clarify:

VMware player and ESXi server are free. No need to use a torrent,
download them from the VMware site. VMware Workstation is not
legally available for free (other than as a limited time trial), and we
do not condone nor allow people to promote software piracy on these
forums.

Virtualbox is an excellent OSS alternative to VMware.

SLED is available as an evaluation version with, IIRC, a 60-day trial
period. Download from the SUSE site (“Novel” is a type of book, “Novell”
is the company that used to be the parent company of SUSE, now it’s The
Attachmate Group).

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

#8

After a recent post in the Technical Forums about this laptop, I did some research and found that the GPUs bench very similarly. So, I don’t know what your reasons might be to switch between GPUs but it likely won’t make much diff. Who knows why HP made the decision to add a low end ATI that just takes up space instead of a better GPU which could justify switching from the non-integrated Intel GPU.

Supplementing what Galko describes, Intel has steadily released superior GPU drivers included with each kernel, so it’s very important to install the latest stable kernel (At the moment I don’t think there is a need to consider unstable kernels)(If you’re not aware, most popular GPU drivers are now distributed in the mainline kernel eliminating the need to install separately). Consistent with this idea, I always highly recommend updating your system soon after initial install with the following command

zypper update

My recommendation regarding snapshots…
I haven’t explored snapshotting in KVM, but the following information is available for SUSE.
A caveat:
SUSE is the commercially supported product which significantly differs from openSUSE (the community project) in most cases, but I’ve found until now that all SUSE documentation related to KVM (and QEMU which is on a merging roadmap with KVM) has been 100% applicable to deploying in openSUSE. Still, one must be watchful for the possibility that a difference may occur some time.

https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/book_kvm/data/sect1_12_chapter_book_kvm.html

You will want to deploy KVM for its use of paravirtualization (with many QEMU features) and not regular QEMU which is full virtualization which is considerably slower while providing vastly more virtualization options (particularly the ability to emulate CPUs different than the existing Host physical CPU). You will also likely want to install libvirt for its tools (vm manager, vm install and virt install) which make it easy to create virtual networks and create/manage your Guests.

All the apps you describe will run fine in any virtualized environment (not just KVM).

Encrypted partitions are typically supported. I’ve deployed LUKS on KVM (and other virtualization) Guests without a problem.

Personally, I prefer LXDE for my lightweight Desktop, but you have other choices as well. When you create openSUSE Guests, just click on “Other” when it comes to selecting a Desktop and try each. Coming from other distros, you will find the enhanced consoles in KDE and LXDE really nice with improved highlighting. I also find vim functions more intuitively.

Whatever your problem was/is with your Fedora encrypted partition, it isn’t because ext4 isn’t recognized. My guess is that the disk partitions or mount points changed somehow. Various threads in the Technical Help forums describe various issues, perhaps most of all the method used to identify the partition.

HTH,
TSU

#9

Actually I think HP crippled this particular model by placing a 3rd gen I7 CPU with crappy chipset that supports max 8Gb RAM + lame support for linux drivers (perhaps their deal with SUSE prevented them to publish drivers as tarballs).
Most of the time my laptop is plugged in and most of the time I want to run 2 VM’s at the same time, I do not want the integrated VGA to eat up CPU and RAM while the dedicated one stays idle.

Last night I had time to upgrade my lappy to 8Gb RAM and a Seagate hybrid HDD (with 8Gb SSD buffer) and to the latest BIOS version so I installed openSUSE 13.1. The first impression was good: it looks good and sharp and performance is good (after the fresh install).
I see that there are also Intel and ATI proprietary drivers that I can install and use (https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/438705-opensuse-graphic-card-practical-theory-guide-users) so hopefully I will be able to use the discrete VGA.