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HP Pavilion DV6-1210SA Troubles SOLVED!

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    HP Pavilion DV6-1210SA Troubles SOLVED!

    Phew! I've just finished a 3 week long saga to get my new HP Pavilion DV6-1210SA laptop working with Linux! I finally managed to get it all working properly and thought I'd post here in the hope that the information might help some other poor soul!

    The laptop specs of importance are as follows:

    - CPU: AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core
    - Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless
    - VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92 (Mobility Radeon HD 4530)
    - Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

    Firstly I tried openSUSE, and found that the wireless wouldn't work and I had to connect with the wired network controller. I tried the madwifi packages but had no luck getting them working - the light on the laptop remained orange whereas it should be blue to indicate that the card is active. I also was limited to 1024x768 and software rasterising, as I couldn't find a suitable graphics card driver anywhere. 3D apps were out of the question. Thirdly I had no audio, but due to the other problems I didn't get around to looking in to this.

    I posted on the openSUSE forums, but got no reply what-so-ever:

    http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/...-problems.html

    I'm originally an Ubuntu user, but I had decided to try openSUSE for a change just to see what else was out there. From my experience with this post and many others that I read on their forums, I felt that their support was just too lacking and I didn't have the patience to wait a long time for answers nor the experience to figure them out for myself. So I gave up on openSUSE I tried Fedora based on a post I read somewhere saying that people had successfully got the Atheros wireless network card working on it.

    With Fedora I found that the wireless network card worked flawlessly, the light even flashed between orange and blue to indicate network activity, which is kind of cool! Still no luck with the graphics or sound though. Around this point I discovered some posts indicating that ATI Catalyst drivers 9.9 worked with _similar_ cards as the Mobility HD 4530, though no mention of this specific card anywhere. I tried the 9.9 Catalyst drivers, only to be presented with a thin bar of corrupt pixels along the top of the screen when I rebooted. A quick recovery session and uninstall later and I had reverted the Catalyst drivers. I tried again and again in many different ways with no luck. I had been trawling the net for answers for days now, and had only really found cryptic hints and recipes that half-worked. I had come across information that the Catalyst drivers were only really supported on Ubuntu, Red Hat, and openSUSE, but still the release notes didn't even mention the Mobility HD 4530. I wasn't willing to go back to openSUSE due to the lack of support, and I thought that Red Hat practically WAS Fedora, but I had also found information that the Catalyst drivers didn't work with the latest kernel, which unfortunately is Fedora's style being a front-line OS.

    I found information that suggested that AMD/ATI weren't allowed to release reference drivers to their laptop cards, as the laptop manufacturers prevented them from doing this for some reason:

    http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

    This is a Windows modding tool written by the community that allows you to use the desktop proprietary drivers in place of the Mobility ones. But, this is a Windows tool - no such thing exists for Linux as far as I could find!

    With this new information that HP might be preventing AMD from releasing Linux drivers for my card, I decided to approach both companies directly to get their take on it. Here's what I got from AMD:

    "AMD/ATI currently does not support laptop products. The reason for this is we only provide the technology to laptop manufacturer's and they integrate them onto the laptop themselves. For this very reason, support as well as drivers will be entirely with your laptop manufacturer. Futhermore, there is currently no support for linux. The drivers that are posted are provided on a "as is" basis

    In order to update this service request, please respond, leaving the service request reference intact.

    Best regards,

    AMD Global Customer Care"


    Okay, so no help there. Here's what HP had to say:

    "Thank you for contacting HP Customer Care.

    I gather from you mail that you are using you notebook as dual boot and unable to find display drivers for Linux.

    Graham, I realize the importance of the issue and will make sure that I give you appropriate information.

    HP does not recommend changing or dual boot, as it might lead to missing device drivers which need to be downloaded separately from third party websites, and I am really sorry to say that we are not trained on Linux. HP and Compaq's warranty and support cover only the original pre-installed operating system and software.

    However, I will try my best to assist you.

    Display driver for Linux.

    http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...8&lang=English

    NOTE: Clicking the link may give an error indicating it is invalid. If this occurs, copy the portion of the address on the remaining line(s) and paste it at the end of the address showing in your browser until the complete address is displayed in the Address box.

    I regret to inform you that the results are not guaranteed, if in case you have any issues installing the drivers you may have to contact Linux support.

    If you need further assistance, please reply to this message and we will be happy to assist you further.

    For information on keeping your HP and Compaq products up and running, please visit our website at: http://www.hp.co.uk/diagnostics

    HP Customer Care http://welcome.hp.com/country/uk/en/support.html

    Sincerely,
    Kenneth
    HP Customer Care"


    Hmm, so hang on - nobody wants to take responsibility for supporting the graphics card in this laptop. I would have thought that at least one of them would have been interested in supporting it.

    So what now? I've got working wireless in Fedora, but no graphics and I hadn't even looked in to the sound card problem yet. I was about ready to throw the towel in and go back to Windows for a few months until the OSS community caught up with this relatively new hardware. One last try...

    I'd always enjoyed using Ubuntu and the Caltalyst driver release notes indicated that Ubuntu was one of their supported systems. However I had started to like KDE when I was using openSUSE and Fedora and felt that I should put some time in to learning more about it. So as one last attempt I installed Kubuntu and thought I'd give Catalyst a try.

    Firstly I discovered that the wireless network card didn't work again, but one quick scan later I discovered that you simply need to install the 'linux-backports-modules-jaunty' package using a wired connection to get the wireless drivers installed and working:

    Code:
    sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
    Secondly, I tried installing the Catalyst 9.9 proprietary drivers again. Despite an error in the log file, to my amazement it worked!!!

    http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...8&lang=English

    I now had full networking, full 3d graphics support, but no audio. Thankfully this was the simplest to solve:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/337590

    And there we have it. I hope this information helps someone else one day and saves you the weeks of torment that I had.

    Regards
    Graham
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