AMD drivers in Trisquel
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Hi everyone,
I didn't find any real answer for my problem so I finally decided to get some help from you. ^^
My problem is that I have Trisquel 6.0.1 installed (using the 3.14.2 kernel thanks to jxself) but I noticed that my laptop would overheat even if I don't do anything on it. So I checked the xorg.conf and radeon doesn't appear there. Even the details in the gnome settings says "VESA:SEYMOUR" so I guess the CPU is doing all the work and that would explain the heating issues.
As I said above, I didn't find any answer on how I could correct this. :/
I have a Debian in which I installed the proprietary driver from AMD, and it doesn't heat but... I really don't want to do that on Trisquel if there is a solution.
Here are some information :
With lspci :
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series] [1002:6760] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
With lshw :
*-display UNCLAIMED
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Seymour [Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series]
vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d4400000-d441ffff ioport:4000(size=256) memory:d4440000-d445ffff
Thanks in advance and sorry for the long post, I wanted to explain as much as possible.
Short version: Radeon GPUs are all terrible with free/libre software. You'll have to either get a somewhat old Nvidia card to replace it, or just deal with not having hardware acceleration; and remember, next time, to get something with Intel integrated graphics, which is the best choice.
Long version:
All AMD/ATI (Radeon) GPUs work only in 2-D, and at least some of them don't even support 2-D hardware acceleration, without proprietary firmware blobs. Because they're proprietary, they are of course not included in Trisquel. You would have the same problem with your GPU in Debian if you didn't install this blob or the proprietary driver from the non-free repository.
To solve the lack of hardware acceleration your current laptop, you would need to replace the Radeon GPU with an Nvidia card that is supported sufficiently by Nouveau and will fit in your laptop. There is no other solution, I'm afraid. You could start with Think Penguin;[1] they sell one Nvidia card that works well with Nouveau. If that's no good for your laptop, you'll have to do some research to make sure you're getting something that has good enough Nouveau support. There's a table of what features are supported for what cards on the Nouveau project website.[2]
Regarding the heating issue: if your laptop's fan is having a hard time keeping up with the CPU's heating, maybe you should invest in a laptop cooler. I once got one for a laptop that had an almost useless fan (mostly because of dust that had accumulated), and it made a world of difference. Alternatively, since it's only overheating because the CPU's doing so much work, you might try underclocking, though I don't know anything about how to do that.
[1] http://libre.thinkpenguin.com
[2] http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/
Thank you for your answer onpon4 !
Err I really wonder why companies like AMD don't release their drivers as free software, I can't see what they gain like that..
Yeah, that's why I installed as I said in my first post the non-free drivers, it works but it is of course non-free and they are not even done properly (tried playing simple games and it does weird things lol).
Your solutions are interesting but unfortunately, it is the laptop which was chosen by my school and I can't change anything on it. :S Also I can't use a laptop cooler since this laptop (HP Elitebook 8560p) is already kinda big and heavy and doesn't fit easily in my "bag". :C
Raaah stupid laptop they choose.
About the underclocking, I already tried that but it wouldn't work properly (I have an i7).
I haven't got any experience with laptops that have got both Intel and ATI/Nvidia 3D acceleration (i.e. I can't tell it from the lspci reading above) but if yours is one of those could using Intel Graphics and treating the AMD GPU as a nonexistant thing work?
Oops sorry if I confused you. Actually the CPU is intel (i7) but the GPU is from AMD.
All Intel CPUs have had Intel integrated GPUs with them for some time. If your laptop has an Intel Core i7 CPU, it specifically has an Intel HD GPU, and the Radeon GPU is a card. Funny enough, the card, which is an add-on, is inferior in the world of free/libre software to the integrated GPU.
I'm not very experienced with the hardware side of things, but from my understanding, you probably can't stop the laptop from using the inferior Radeon card without physically taking it out. If you can take it out, you should do so. That would solve your hardware acceleration problem completely, since Intel provides free/libre drivers for all Intel integrated GPUs.
OMG it looks like your right I didn't know that was possible, I just checked on Windows (many friends are still lazy to use Pidgin so I only use Windows when I need Skype xD) which CPU I am using and it looks like it is this :
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-2640M-Notebook-Processor.59913.0.html (sorry no https). But if I have to take it out to be able to use it, that's not fair lol. Is that why even on lspci and lshw is isn't listed ?
Check the BIOS setup at the very early stage of booting. There you might find an option to disable the radeon.
Saying from own experience, sometimes the vendor might just disable the IGPU for no reason. http://h-node.org/notebooks/view/en/100/R580--NP-R580-JS01CZ-
Hope that times have changed since early 2010 practices. (=
Indeed, there is no option in the BIOS. :(
What is the output of "top"? There is a bug in Trisquel mini, which leads to some overheating. Restarting lxdm can help, though.
Yeah I remember this bug but there I'm not using Trisquel Mini. ;)
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