Arch Linux

sudo make sandwich

Member

Registered: 2010-11-18

Posts: 9

Would Arch run fine on my brand new laptop? (HP dv6 3046eo)

Hi!
I am wondering if Arch would run fine on my new laptop (HP dv6 3046eo). I've already tried Ubuntu 10.10 (Desktop) on it, but it wasn't a very pleasant try. My laptop made quite some heat, in comparison to when running Win7. After some testing and tweaking, I'm quite certain that it was the graphics card driver that did not scale the frequency properly.
Anyways, now I'm very tempted to install Arch on it, after beeing introduced to it, and after testing on my (much) older laptop. Do you think I will have the same problem in Arch, and if not, what graphics card driver do you recommend? Simply the RadionHD one?

Laptop details:
HP Pavilion dv6-3046 15.6" HD, Radeon HD5650,Phenom II N620,6GB RAM,640GB, HDD,DVD±RW,kamera, BT.
(Probably dual booting with win7)

EDIT: Also the b43 driver (WLAN) says 'partially supported 2.6.33 and later' (http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Dri … CI_devices), will I get a problem getting my wireless up?
(Card: 03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:4727] (rev 01)), or would the b43 driver suit my needs without much tweaking?

Last edited by sudo make sandwich (2010-11-23 21:36:26)

thestinger

Package Maintainer (PM)

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2010-01-23

Posts: 478

Re: Would Arch run fine on my brand new laptop? (HP dv6 3046eo)

Arch will work fine if you are willing to put some work into it. You need to setup CPU frequency scaling for sure.

You'll have to choose between xf86-video-ati (the open source radeon driver) and catalyst (the closed source driver). I recommend the radeon driver (with KMS), but power management has to be configured manually.

You'll also have to enable ALSA powersaving, laptop mode (to make the hard drive spin down), and set up acpid. All the information you need is on the wiki.

If wireless worked in Ubuntu, you can get it to work in Arch (it will probably work, but it might be missing something like power management).

sudo make sandwich

Member

Registered: 2010-11-18

Posts: 9

Re: Would Arch run fine on my brand new laptop? (HP dv6 3046eo)

Thanks! I'll look into it as soon as I've got time!