Sunday, January 24, 2016

HP Omen i7 Quadcore + Ubuntu 15.10 AMD 64

Finally a new computer, first one in a few years.

HP - OMEN 15.6" Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 8GB Memory - 256GB Solid State Drive on sale at Best Buy.

How annoying is it, machine is unusable until you activate Windows 8 with a Microsoft registration. No matter, here comes Ubuntu 15.10 AMD 64 ...

Using usb-creator, configured a USB flash drive for installing Ubuntu 15.10 AMD 64 ISO.

On power up hold keys FN-F10-ESC, then F9 accesses "Boot Device Options" ().
  • Select "USB Hard Drive (UEFI) - SanDisk Cruzer"
  • On the flash disk Ubuntu boot menu, select "Try Ubuntu without installing" (from "Install Ubuntu" it would not consistently boot from the USB)
All 4 USB ports are on the back of the machine which is occasionally annoying. Several tries to get machine booted from USB, and the boot makes a lot of noise about "Nouveau PIBUS 0xbadf1100" on startup console which seem to hang the machine. When the machine finally booted it locked up several times for no apparent reason and had to be forcibly rebooted. Doesn't seem to be any consistency to this so I suspect (and hope) merely a quirk related to the USB bootable system.

Hang in there and eventually the thing gets booted - waited to plug in HP supplied USB-Ethernet adapter until the machine successfully made all the way to the desktop. Finally, select "Auto Ethernet" from the connections menu (interface is reported by ifconfig as enx0050b67d3ecc).


As far as for configuring the AC 7260 WiFi ... this doesn't seem to work until only after making the modification to modules configuration as shown below (so after OS install this can certainly be fixed,  but use of WiFi during install from Ubuntu 15.10 environment booted from USB stick may be possible by rmmod'ing acer_wmi and related modules and re-configuring the wlo1 interface).


Selected "Download updates while installing".
Did not select "Install the third party software".



Not my screen shot here but as I recall the default partitioning of the 256 Gb SSD drive left about 120 Gb available for a Ubuntu partition - and presumably I won't have problem erasing Windows and re-partitioning and reclaiming 100 or so Gb of SSD. As unpacked out of the box, there is a Windows 8.1 un-activated install - selecting option to Install alongside; subsequent (re)installation attempts do not encounter this dialog but rather the following one (Installation type)  ...


"Installation type" ... "Erase Ubuntu 15.10 and reinstall"


With the following added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, AC 7260 WiFi is working on wlo1 :

blacklist acer_wmi

(Edit: In the live CD environment, rmmod acer_wmi to unload the kernel modules, then restart networking with the command service network-manager restart).

After a bumpy start installing Ubuntu 15.10, once the install process is done it only takes a few seconds to boot the machine. On sporadic occasions the machine fails to boot and returns to the BIOS boot manager a few seconds after attempting Linux boot from the GRUB menu.

One final observation is that on power up the machine always stops at Boot Manager requiring the manual selection of "OS boot Manager (UEFI) - ubuntu (SanDisk SD6PP4M-256G-1006)".

Update: after significant frustration with erratic system hangs, and also reverting to Xubuntu 14.04 in the process, I did some webbing for laptop-suspend problems and got the impression those problems were often related to display drivers. Searching the device "NVIDIA Corporation Device 139b" as reported by lspci yielded some helpful info and having upgraded the video driver from the xorg-edgers ppa the (resume from) suspend seems to work.

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6 comments:

  1. Abid BodalFebruary 21, 2016 at 11:41 PM

    Hi,

    Thanks for the excellent blog post.

    I am currently seeing a similar issue with my omen where the display does not show up after a suspend. I tried to install the proprietary drivers pointed to by the link but that did not work. After I install the NVIDIA drivers I am not able to log in and do not see the main ubuntu 14.04 desktop screen. After purging the NVIDIA drivers I am able to log back in.

    I tried the following commands (and rebooted)
    sudo apt-get install nvidia-331 nvidia-settings nvidia-prime

    and
    apt-get install nvidia-352 nvidia-settings nvidia-prime

    Any other suggestions. I would love to not have to restart my machine every time I go into suspend.

    Below is my graphics card version
    $lspci | grep 3D
    01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 860M] (rev a2)


    Thanks,
    Abid.

    ReplyDelete
  2. neidermFebruary 22, 2016 at 4:31 PM

    Abid,

    I noticed that your lspci output is not the same as I have. Did you have any other drivers on your system before, I think you're supposed to remove those first:
    sudo apt-get purge libvdpau-va-gl1 bumblebee* nvidia*

    My Nvidia GPU is being reported as Decice 139b, so if yours has the same card I wonder why lspci reports it differently :

    lspci | grep 3D
    01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 139b (rev a2)

    Ever since I made the blog post I have been running the nvidia-352 set from xorg-edgers ppa and the machine is still running quite well - it's Xubuntu 14.04.03 .

    good luck!,
    -glenn neidermeier

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousFebruary 29, 2016 at 12:46 PM

    Hi Glenn,

    Very nice post, made installation of Ubuntu on my Omen a breeze. One question though, when I start my pc I immediately get Windows booting unless I press escape and select Ubuntu from boot menu. It doesn't stop at boot manager as in your case which I would prefer. I would be grateful for any ideas on how to fix it.

    Thanks!
    Tomasz

    ReplyDelete
  4. neidermFebruary 29, 2016 at 5:26 PM

    Hi Tomasz,
    Glad it was helpful for you. I still have no idea why my machine always stops on "Startup Menu". I don't remember anything I did to cause that and I find nothing in the BIOS setup to make it that way. Fortunately it does sleep very well and it's not too often I even reboot the thing.
    good luck,
    -GN

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownSeptember 22, 2016 at 4:19 PM

    Dude, thanks you so much for this! The wifi issue was making me tear out my hair yesterday! And did you ever figure out the boot loader issue? Awesome article!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. neidermSeptember 23, 2016 at 4:12 AM

    Glad to be of help. No new updates on this. I wish the battery life of this machine wasn't so pathetic, but otherwise it's a decent computer.

    ReplyDelete

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