Hi All I have completed the LM17.1 install on Judy's laptop. The only part the does not work, and does not affect Judy, is the Blutooth adapter This bug applies:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/453605/ralink-rt-3290-bluetooth-problem-on-ubuntu-14-04 It looks to be close to being fixed so Blutooth may be fixed at some future update. The fan appeared to be operating as normal and not at full speed as reported elsewhere. In fact lm-sensors could not find any chip reporting on fan speed. The BIOS had a straight fan on/off switch so it may be controlled by a simple thermostat. It turned out that the Laptop is actually a 255 not 250, signifying an AMD CPU. This was not otherwise significant because the 255 also has a Ubuntu release and restricted BIOS. Whilst I tried many boot combinations with Judy over the phone it seems we were never able to invoke the MBR version of LM17.1. When I got my hands on the laptop I discovered that the BIOS always prefers the UEFI boot version, so this may have been the reason. However, by attaching an external DVD drive I was able to choose the MBR boot version and this loaded with no complaints from Grub. Thankfully it was no more complicated than this. I loaded the software on a clean reformatted disk, applied the updates, did a bit of tidying up of the menus, tested it and everything worked fine (apart from the Blutooth). Lessons Learned --------------- This exercise was quite instructive and you may be interested in the following findings. 1. Just because a computer is delivered with Ubuntu does not mean it is particularly suited to running Linux. The version of Ubuntu can be (and I believe was) specially tweaked to work on the particular machine it was delivered with. See: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201301-12662/ 2. Support is questionable. I could not find anywhere to download the tweaked version of Ubuntu, or its update. Ubuntu 14.04 had the BT problem whereas the tweaked 12.04 version did not. This could tie the user to an old version of Linux, which will eventually become unsupported. I found no dedicated Ubuntu support page for this laptop. 3. Support was also compromised by the fact that there was no way to update the laptop BIOS under Ubuntu. Worse, if you got to the HP BIOS download page using a Linux computer the BIOS download link is completely hidden from you! The HP process for updating the BIOS is quite complex and always requires Windows 7 or 8 to be running on the machine to be updated. One commentator described the HP BIOS update process as a shambles, which I could well believe seeing the number of procedure changes, workarounds and failed updates reported. I could not find the full HP BIOS update history to see if any were worth installing. The latest update was a security one but referred to UEFI which we were not using. I did not update the BIOS and would not have been confident that it would take and not brick the laptop, quite apart from the pain of temporarily installing Windows, which takes hours. 4. Always avoid restricted BIOS interfaces. There was a long discussion on the web on how this was even stopping the HP laptop working for Windows users. Linux may have greater need of the advanced pages if the normal settings are Windows-centric (Though I find Boot order and switching off secure boot covers most issues). One commentator (rightly) said PC's are not closed platform Apple devices so it is never a good idea to stop administrators accessing BIOS screens. 5. I like to give machines a quick clean before returning them. I may have been lucky but my now old laptop had an accessible fan and cooling hardware under a single plastic cover and it was really easy to keep clean. I checked on youtube and the fan for the HP is buried in the depths of the machine and access involves a lot of time and significant risk of damage. So I had to give it back as it was. My conclusions are that I was lucky to get LM17 working so quickly as it could have been much more difficult, especially if a BIOS update was needed. I noticed that the first question on the Linux forums is "Have you updated the BIOS?" when reporting a problem. Maintainability of the HP was poor with significant effort and risk associated with cleaning or replacing a fan. I think I would look elsewhere if I was buying a new laptop (for Windows or Linux). Hope this is useful Cheers Clive _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
