My laptop needed to be renewed. More and more of our lab environment has moved into our computers, and the ability to run virtual machines on our portable platforms has made the urge for a more powerful laptop bigger.
Thus I bought a new laptop!
After browsing and cruising I settled for a HP Pavilion DV7 1095eo. My idea is to document the “quirks” here so that others can benefit from my misstakes and victories.
This is a picture of the machine.
The specs of the machine is somewhat like this:
* dual core 2.53 GHz 64 bit
* 4 Gig of ram
* 17″ display
* fingerprint reader
* wifi card
* 2 x 250 Gb HD
* web cam
* IR remote
The machine comes with VISTA HOME EDITION. Well…hey…!
After wipeing the machine clean I installed SuSE 11.0, after all I do have very good experience of SuSE linux. Bearing in mind that this is a .0 release I was quite happy that almost everything worked out of the box, but four things; sound, fingerprint reader, remote and wireless nic.
— UPDATE —
Today I got my soundcard working. After finding similar errors and the fixes to them in the UBUNTU forum. It seams that I have to give the ALSA driver ‘snd-hda-intel.ko’ the enable_msi=1 option in /etc/modprobe.d/sound file. This enables ‘Message Signaled Interrupt’ a fairly new way of ‘soft’ interrupts. Actually my first guess was interrupt problems. Without this option the sound locks in an everlasting stuttering loop and totally blocks the sound device. Only way to shut down sound is to restart the soundsystem with ‘rcalsasound restart’. This is how my /etc/modprobe.d/sound looks like after adding the option:
—————-
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1
—————-
Yast2 made it all but the option line.
