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I have Arch runing on my desktop and everything is fine, and I really want to use Arch on my new laptop. But I have some important work to do and don`t want to loose a day or 2 to try to make arch and everything work and then to find out that something does not have proper drivers or something. My specs are :
HM67 chipset (new Sandy Bridge)
i7-2600 2.0ghz CPU
nvidia gt525m 1gb ddr3 graphic card, and some integrated Intel HD graphic chip
2x4GB ddr3 1333mhz
A-Data s511 sata6 SSD 120gb
I think DELL wireless and bluetooth chip. Realtek ethernet chip.
No unusuall buttons on the keyboard or something like that. Have Logitech m505 wireless mouse (no extra buttons, just usual ones)
My primary concern is if everything here have proper drivers? And I read about problems with switching between integrated and descrete graphic with nvidia. Is there a solution? I don`t want to run nvidia whole time when it is not needed, it drains battery and makes laptop much hotter and louder. Also, I want to use SSD like it should and with TRIM and such. Which FS? Ext4 or btrfs is stable enough?
I`ll use laptop primary for work, programming.
Any advice would be useful. I just don`t have time now to loose a few days, so if something can not be made to work, I just want to know in advance.
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If it's Optimus, there is no graphic card switching (Optimus isn't about switching). But you can get the nvidia card going with Bumblebee. Wireless shouldn't be a problem nowadays, but we can't know for sure until we see 'lspci -nn' output.
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Thanks. So with bumblebee there should be no problem to turn off and on nvidia as I need it? Are there any laptop specific tools/apps that should be installed? Is intel turbo boost working 'out of the box' or should I install something to get it going? What about SSD and FS?
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Turning off the nvidia card could be tricky. The Bumblebee package in AUR says "Power management not supported", you'll have to manually figure out how to do that. The acpi_call kernel module is usually used for that. If all this sounds tricky, it's because Bumblebee is more of a hack than a real solution. If at all possible, I'd get a machine with switchable graphic cards. But pretty much only Asus makes those.
Turbo boost works out of the box. And for the disk, I wouldn't treat it special just because it's SSD.
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Well, I could not resist new arch iso that was made a few days ago. Tried install yesterday on laptop. Everything went really smooth as usuall. I even made crypt and logical blocks for the first time, easy. Set sha512 crypt for password, and other fancy stuff. Everything was really ok, I installed Intel drivers first because I was shure they will work. Then tried to install nvidia and lost 5 hours trying to make them work... And I did not, so frustrating, I concluded that with optimus you cant boot with nvidia driver enabled? Anyway, I returned to Intel driver and installed bumlbebee without any problem. It is a good solution, my laptop using Intel chip for everything, and I can turn on nvidia card when I need it for a specific app with one easy command. I turned on TRIM for SSD, set some fancy power saving options, cpufreq etc.. Everything works, bluetooth, wireless, ethernet, camera, wireless mouse, touchpad with scroll areas, graphics etc.. I didnt use swap at all because I have 8GB of ram. Also I set /tmp to ram.
One queston, with cpufreq-info in area where possible frequences are listed, 2GHz is listed two times. I guess one is turbo boost mode?
One can really not avoid enjoying arch, such a wonderfull distro!
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