In the last 6 months, I've seen a lot of people buying HP dv6 laptops. HP has had a bad reputation with laptop buyers with all the heating problems and other issues, but it seems to have hit the bulls eye with the newer dv6s. Newer models arrive frequently, and are quite a bit of improvement over the older ones. The dv6 6012tx, for example, made a major leap in sound quality, and I would rate its sound almost as good as the XPS's famed JBL speakers (yep, it's that good). With all the hardware improvements, care packs (extended warranty packs) that cost half as much as Dell's, and a much sleeker profile, the dv6 has emerged as a solid alternative to the XPS.
(PS: I can't vouch for HP's warranty quality, but I know for a fact that Dell's is downright awesome. They are more than happy to change parts, whatever the reason for failure be. However, seeing that I spilled lassi on my lappy's keyboard, causing 4-5 keys to stop functioning, a review on HP's after-sales service will be up shortly). The only thing that disappoints me in the newer dv6 7000 series is the switch from AMD Radeon 6770M in the i7 model to nvidia 630M. Granted, nvidia's switchable graphics implementation (called Optimus) is much better than AMD's. Getting AMD cards to switch smoothly can be a pain in Linux, which is what this post is all about. But the 6770M is a solid mid-end graphics card, ranking 82nd on notebookcheck's mobile graphics rank lists, whereas the 630M is decidedly mainstream at a rank of around 112.
Anyway, if you are a new dv6 user who plans to install Ubuntu, you'll have a fair share of problems, more than XPS users anyway.
First, you'll have to deal with HP's ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLY HORRENDOUSLY (DIE, YOU PARTITION SCHEME DESIGNING BITCH AT HP!!!) CRAPPY partitioning scheme. HP saves the average noob the trouble of evaluating a different OS, because he won't be able to make an informed choice on how to re-partition his system. Here's HP's partitioning scheme found on all dv6s. It consists of four primary partitions (which is the maximum number of primary partitions allowed on a hard drive).
1. (<100 MB) Bootloader partition - This one contains files required by Windows at the time of boot.
2. Windows partition - it contains the Windows install and most of the empty hard disk space.
3. (~14GB) Windows recovery partition - it contains files needed to restore Windows to a factory state in case you've screwed up with your current install. It can also be used to create recovery DVDs (only one set of such DVDs can be made).
4. HP_TOOLS (<100MB) - This partition is required if you need to upgrade the BIOS. If you download and run the BIOS setup from HP website, it places new files in this partition, and these files are detected by the OS on restart.
If you want to install another OS, you need to get rid of one of these partitions, since there is a limit of four primary partitions per hard drive.
In my opinion, the HP_TOOLS is the most expendable since it's easy to restore it in case a newer version of the BIOS with some major feature is released. First, make sure you've installed the latest BIOS available on the website, and then you can remove this drive. Some people prefer to create recovery DVDs and then remove the recovery partition, but I don't trust optical disks. IMO, they're too fragile and prone to environmental factors. Plus, the convenience of having a recovery partition on the hard disk in unmatched. Although, you can not combine the 100MB you gained by removing HP_TOOLS with the space recovered by shrinking the Windows partition. Which means that that 100 MB as good as gone, small price to pay for the freedom to install any OS.
Anyway, you can then shrink the Windows partition by some suitable amount - I prefer about 40GB for Ubuntu. I also suggest that you mount /home and / on separate logical partitions. It comes in handy when you're testing multiple distros. After that, it's quite easy - installing Linux is a breeze once you figure out the partitioning scheme, even if tweaking it to get all hardware working is not.
That's it for this post. In the next post, I'll outline how to switch off that darned discrete GPU by installing the fglrx driver.
(PS: I can't vouch for HP's warranty quality, but I know for a fact that Dell's is downright awesome. They are more than happy to change parts, whatever the reason for failure be. However, seeing that I spilled lassi on my lappy's keyboard, causing 4-5 keys to stop functioning, a review on HP's after-sales service will be up shortly). The only thing that disappoints me in the newer dv6 7000 series is the switch from AMD Radeon 6770M in the i7 model to nvidia 630M. Granted, nvidia's switchable graphics implementation (called Optimus) is much better than AMD's. Getting AMD cards to switch smoothly can be a pain in Linux, which is what this post is all about. But the 6770M is a solid mid-end graphics card, ranking 82nd on notebookcheck's mobile graphics rank lists, whereas the 630M is decidedly mainstream at a rank of around 112.
Anyway, if you are a new dv6 user who plans to install Ubuntu, you'll have a fair share of problems, more than XPS users anyway.
First, you'll have to deal with HP's ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLY HORRENDOUSLY (DIE, YOU PARTITION SCHEME DESIGNING BITCH AT HP!!!) CRAPPY partitioning scheme. HP saves the average noob the trouble of evaluating a different OS, because he won't be able to make an informed choice on how to re-partition his system. Here's HP's partitioning scheme found on all dv6s. It consists of four primary partitions (which is the maximum number of primary partitions allowed on a hard drive).
1. (<100 MB) Bootloader partition - This one contains files required by Windows at the time of boot.
2. Windows partition - it contains the Windows install and most of the empty hard disk space.
3. (~14GB) Windows recovery partition - it contains files needed to restore Windows to a factory state in case you've screwed up with your current install. It can also be used to create recovery DVDs (only one set of such DVDs can be made).
4. HP_TOOLS (<100MB) - This partition is required if you need to upgrade the BIOS. If you download and run the BIOS setup from HP website, it places new files in this partition, and these files are detected by the OS on restart.
If you want to install another OS, you need to get rid of one of these partitions, since there is a limit of four primary partitions per hard drive.
In my opinion, the HP_TOOLS is the most expendable since it's easy to restore it in case a newer version of the BIOS with some major feature is released. First, make sure you've installed the latest BIOS available on the website, and then you can remove this drive. Some people prefer to create recovery DVDs and then remove the recovery partition, but I don't trust optical disks. IMO, they're too fragile and prone to environmental factors. Plus, the convenience of having a recovery partition on the hard disk in unmatched. Although, you can not combine the 100MB you gained by removing HP_TOOLS with the space recovered by shrinking the Windows partition. Which means that that 100 MB as good as gone, small price to pay for the freedom to install any OS.
Anyway, you can then shrink the Windows partition by some suitable amount - I prefer about 40GB for Ubuntu. I also suggest that you mount /home and / on separate logical partitions. It comes in handy when you're testing multiple distros. After that, it's quite easy - installing Linux is a breeze once you figure out the partitioning scheme, even if tweaking it to get all hardware working is not.
That's it for this post. In the next post, I'll outline how to switch off that darned discrete GPU by installing the fglrx driver.
