1) The clicking sound could also be the hard drive. Check the SMART
health for it.
2) You can get later open-source drivers by switching the Debian/Jessie.
The current state of Testing is a 3.10 kernel but the proprietary
drivers aren't available for it yet.
You can also try switching to another .deb distro that offers later
proprietary drivers like Ubuntu or Mint. These offer proprietary drivers
with a 6-month release schedule so the software is more up to date than
Debian/Wheezy but still fairly stable.
Thank you for the reply:
1) I will check and see if I can install SMART health on my system. I
made a google search and it seems like it has an RPM package. I guess I
will need to compile from sources.
I tried this laptop with an Ubuntu based distribution, specifically
Xubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. I was occasionally getting the similar click
sounds. I think that it may be related to the Debian based kernels (I am
not sure but I assume Ubuntu's kernel is related to the Debian's).
Xubuntu 13.04 was even worse, it wasn't playing well with my sound card
at all, the sound was occasionally going down. I may try Ubuntu Gnome
13.10 to see if there is any improvements.
I used fedora 18 and 19 for a couple of months and I didn't have the
same issue. Same goes for opensuse, I used it for 6 months and I didn't
have any problems.
2) I tried the open source driver with backported kernel 3.10 in Wheezy
but it didn't improve. The package was linux-firmware-nonfree, version
0.39. I was ending up with a burning machine after I make a few clicks.
I doubt that Jessie currently uses a better open source driver from that
of the backported kernel. So, I guess if I want to go with Debian, the
only choice for me is to stick to the kernel 3.2 (which is a bit old for
my laptop) with closed source driver and ignore the click sounds.
I think Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 may be a better option since it comes with
kernel 3.11 reportedly having a better open source driver for amd radeon
graphics. But I don't like the fact that I will need to make an upgrade
after 6 months. I want to use my machine as a productivity laptop.
This is the reason I am considering opensuse if I can't find a
workaround with debian. Opensuse 13.1 will be an evergreen release
meaning that I can keep it for almost 3 years with security updates. But
I am willing to continue with Debian rather than an RPM based distro.
Any suggestions for an alternative productivity linux which can
potentially play well with my laptop would be well appreciated.
Best Regards,
S. Sahin
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