HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

pochiimran · 2013-08-12 14:22:15

hello friends , after a lot of consideration and taking a big leap of faith i uninstalled my windows 8 and opted to install Archlinux and though i am not expert yet i have a little bit of experience of Ubuntu and Mint.

I ask forgiveness before hand if the question seems stupid and noobish enough.

I am facing a lot of problems but i am not willing to budge from archlinux and will continue to do and in the process keep learning.

These are the problems that i am facing currently please help to solve them .

First things first , my laptop is a AMD A8 Trinity APU with dual/switchable grpahics both ATI RADEON. Downloaded the latest Archlinux , i believe with 3.10 kernel

PRIMARY ISSUES ---

1. At boot both of my graphics card are shown as working with the help of this command

lspci -vnnn | perl -lne 'print if /^\d+\:.+(\[\S+\:\S+\])/' | grep VGA

generating lot of heat and low battery life.

NOW , i did find a solution after reading Archwiki (echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch) and added this line to radeon.conf file as said and IT WORK's at boot
BUT only when root user account is accessed , otherwise it says permission denied( i even tried giving myself root privileges in the sudoers file yet it says permission denied )

How to make it work for any user , without having to manually turn off discrete GPU everytime i turn on my laptop.

2 . Also at boot , prior to entering login credentials at console login , i get an error "Could not find LED Backlight Controller" ?

Please shed some light into this as i thought it would mean i wont be able to control the screen brightness but i am able to using the onkeyboard buttons.

3. SOUND - with the help of archwiki , i unmuted the channels using " alsamixer " , and i am able to get BEEP tone , but when i was on youtube , there was no sound

i even tested it with by playing a song.

4. SUSPEND AND HIBERNATE :

Whenever i use suspend , my laptop doesnt resume properly .. ie i get a blank screen after resuming

on HIbernate - screen turns off , but the power doesnt go OFF ,

5. KEYBOARD :

All the keys are working fine , but my laptop has keys for volume + and - , mute , key that acts as a mouse right click.

I would really like to be able to use those keys , please tell me how do i go about doing that.

6. Everytime i login i have to manually connect to wifi using "wifi-menu" , I read the archwiki saying create a profile using netctl , i did that but that only work when i login as root

7. BEST LAPTOP USE - After rreading archwiki , i installed laptop-mode tools , to get the best of laptop,

However what other stuff that i need to provide me a very good laptop solution providing me good battery life and power.

SECONDARY ISSUES ---

a . When i installed i created a 100G partition for /home , but i forgot about the 300G partition , so its there as a linux filesystem , i believe unattached.

So how to extend my /home partition to 400G OR be able to use like windows (c: for windows , other partitions for personal use)

b. my portable HDD is pasword protected , so it runs an unlock.exe program as soon as its inserted in windows , So how to get that file working in linux so that i can access my portable HDD , i can also make it not password protected , but i would like some security

Thanking you for taking time to read and helping me out.

Imran

Last edited by pochiimran (2013-08-12 14:23:28)

schmidtbag · 2013-08-13 20:02:55

1. You could either upgrade to the 3.11 kernel to get proper power management for the radeon drivers, or, since you're using a HD5000 based GPU, you could switch to Catalyst (you'll get better performance with that). I recommend installing catalyst-total from the AUR, as that has a smoother experience than the other choices. Arch definitely is not the most ATI/AMD friendly distro out there, unfortunately. On the other hand, it is one of the only distros (that I'm aware of) that isn't limited by kernel version when using the catalyst drivers.

2. So, are you saying you are able to control the backlight regardless of the error? If so, I wouldn't worry about the error - linux is a little on the "stupid" side when it comes to controlling backlights. It's fully capable of it, but it often doesn't do a good job assuming what you want. This again may be fixable using the catalyst drivers.

3. There's a possibility the sound is playing out of a different source, such as HDMI. What do you want to hear the sound come out of, and what is the result of "aplay -L"?

4. I haven't attempted suspend or hibernation on an AMD system in a while (which is weird considering most of my computers are AMD based), but I'm not aware if AMD has fixed all of their power management issues yet. Hibernation might fail if you don't have a sufficient swap partition. Again, the Catalyst drivers could possibly fix this.

5. Which desktop environment are you using? (The DE can also have an impact on suspend/hibernation.)

6. I personally hate netctl - it's good to get you started but it screws with all other network tools. I'd suggest doing yourself a favor by installing something like networkmanager or wicd-gtk and remove anything netctl related.

7. I'm not sure what that package includes, but really the best thing to have is to configure your CPU frequency governors:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CP … cy_Scaling

a. Boot into a live CD such as Parted Magic and use gparted to resize the partitions.
b. Well, you could try running it via wine, but I'd recommend you remove this security system on the drive and use a cross-platform encryption system. I don't know any off the top of my head - my personal files aren't secret enough, and I don't bring them anywhere I go.

pochiimran · 2013-08-18 15:31:37

thankx schmidtbag ffor the reply ...

however i seem to have run into a problem with the catalyst driver , i am directly installing from the amd website, however when i am installing the driver , there seems to be an error , saying that 13.8 beta driver needs kernel 3.7

sound issue has been solved

however i am not able to get through suspend and hibernate , inspite follwing all that wiki had to offer.

Please help me out , as more hands the better in solving a problem.

Thanking you

schmidtbag · 2013-08-18 18:20:03

no don't install directly from the website - install catalyst-total from the AUR. Arch has some strange modifications that break the default drivers, the kernel being one of them. I HIGHLY recommend you install the program "yaourt" first - it makes life much easier for Arch users. From there, you can do "yaourt -S catalyst-total".

clfarron4 · 2013-08-18 23:06:15

Something which I'm pretty sure I've seen on the AMD/ATi Bar Grill thread is using Bumblebee with both radeon (for the less powerful) and AMD Catalyst (for the more powerful).

As for actually installing AMD Catalyst, for either AUR packages or Vi0l0's repositories.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-08-12 14:22:15

HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

#2 2013-08-13 20:02:55

Re: HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

#3 2013-08-18 15:31:37

Re: HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

#4 2013-08-18 18:20:03

Re: HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

#5 2013-08-18 23:06:15

Re: HP Pavilion G6-2005ax AMD APU- After Installation issues

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