I just recently replaced my Dell Precision M6300 with a brand new HP ZBook 17 G2. I have used Dell Precision laptops, both personally and in my business, almost exclusively for over 15 years until this purchase. This new HP ZBook runs OpenSUSE 13.2 flawlessly and most everything works right out of the box from sleep/suspend to the sound volume controls to the display brightness controls, wifi, etc. There are only a couple of things that I have seen not function perfectly and I will get to that later in this post. What is really cool is that you can set the video up to use Bumblebee hybrid video or dedicated nVidia video since the BIOS lets you select whether you want to use hybrid graphics or not. I have run it both ways and I think that I actually like the dedicated nVidia video better than Bumblebee. So, I have finally settled on disabling hybrid video and running my nVidia K2200M video card 100% of the time. After disabling the hybrid video in BIOS, I installed the nVidia driver (X11-video-nvidiaG04 and related files) from OpenSUSE’s nVidia repo. However, it would not work properly after I installed it using YaST with X windows running. So, I ended up installing it from the command line with zypper after booting into run level 2. The nVidia driver installed perfectly and has been running great ever since. However, I am not getting the nVidia splash screen at startup like I have always seen in the past with dedicated nVidia laptops. I am certain that I am actually running the dedicated nVidia driver (and not Nouveau or Bumblebee). Also, I have confirmed that I am running the dedicated nVidia card/driver with “lspci -v”, glxinfo|grep OpenGL" as well as the nVidia settings GUI program. In any event, I have a couple of questions.
- Is the nVidia splash screen no longer supposed to be displayed on startup or have I missed something?
- Is the nVidia driver installation supposed to work using YaST with X windows running or is it intended to require it to be installed from the command line after booting into run level 2 without X running?
Now, the following is all that I have seen that doesn’t work:
Hibernate works most of the time. However, I have had two instances where the ZBook did not successfully wake up from hibernation, once with the nVidia dedicated video card and once with Bumblebee (with the Intel video card). The problem both times appear to be restoration of the video. This is OK since I primarily use sleep/suspend instead. I haven’t investigated this further but there may be an easy workaround anyway.
I am running KDE and the age old problem with the sleep-suspend on nVidia not resuming from suspend properly occurs with the nVidia card only. I have not experienced any resume failures while running Bumblebee (with the Intel video card). I have a work around for the nVidia suspend problem that works flawlessly and which I have documented here in post 133:
That script works 100% of the time suspending/resuming and I simply program the script into a function key with Desktop Settings > Shortcuts and Gestures > Custom Shortcuts. Then, I use my custom function key for sleep-suspend. As an aside, the KDE developers have developed a fix for the KDE/nVidia sleep-suspend problem. I haven’t tested it but you can read about it here toward the bottom of the bug report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344326
Unfortunately, this fix is intended for KDE 5.x only…
FYI,
Gordon