[ignacioalex]

hello folks,

I've recently bought an HP Pavilion DV6125se notebook. It has a Turion 64 X2 processor, NVidia Go 6150 video card, etc. The full specification is:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...259297&lang=en

I've installed open Suse 10.2 for x86_64; the kernel version is 2.6.18.2 . The installation went fine with only a minor glitch: the touchpad was too sensitive and a little buggy, but that was fixed after installation.

After installation I experienced hard lock-ups during the boot or shutdown process at nearly half the ocasions. When booting it stops at "Setting up the hardware clock", whereas during shutdown it freezes at "Set hardware clock to the current system time". I've tried the iommu=off noirqdebug boot options, and also did some experiments adding the acpi_use_timer_override flag without success. The only way I found to get a stable system is with the noapic flag. I've also tried a few other random options I found in other forums: irqpoll acpi=noirq pci=biosirq , acpi=bios, which also didn't work.

Although the system is stable, I have problems. In about half the ocasions the sound card doesn't work. The system appears to behave as if it had detected it, as when I open a sound file in Helix I get no error and it starts playing it, however without any sound coming out the speaker. In other ocasions when the ethernet cable is unplugged it takes a while trying to connect and then the tray icon shows that the network is connected. An interesting behavior is that in very few boots grub opens up with a very fancy animation screen with penguins walking all over, instead of the simple screen I used to see in other distributions.

Is this a problem with the buggy bios? Is there any other boot option I could try?

My bios version is F.19 . Searching through HP's website and google I couldn't find any bios update, so could someone please post a link to the most recent bios?

In case I have to resort to the pre-installed Windows XP, is there any hope that the problem with the bios will be fixed in a later kernel so that I can switch back to Linux? Would you suggest any other distribution with a very up to date kernel I could give a try?

Thanks for any help,

Alex

[ignacioalex]

This month HP released a bios update for my Paviolion dv6125se that fixed the sound problem under Suse 10.2 . This is the first update that they posted for my notebook model and I wonder why could it go straight from F.19 to F.28 with no other release in between!

I still need to boot with noapic, though.

[devils casper]

are you typing noapic on every boot up? you can add this option in menu.lst file.
SuSe picks GRUB's splash image randomly. it has nothing to do with BIOS.

[ignacioalex]

Sure, I know I can add it to grub.
The random screen is an interesting behavior, the probability of getting it is of the order of 1%!
Actually, I'm no longer using Suse, I installed the brand new Sabayon 3.3 and everything worked out of the box. I was having trouble trying to install NVidia's driver under Suse: I followed the instructions in their wiki and added the repository to Yast, however that destroyed my X system! It seems like there's need to tweak xorg.conf to make it work.