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My new laptop

A week ago I bought an HP G6-2005AX Notebook.

Basic specs:
  • AMD A8-4500M  Vision Quadcore CPU with Radeon HD Graphics
  • Dedicated GPU 2MB ATI Radeon 6840
  • 64 bit OS (Windows Home Basic, Linux)
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 500 GB harddisk (Toshiba ATA)
I bought this from an HP dealer near Indiranagar and I paid INR 34,000 all inclusive.


While I started running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin  , I quickly migrated to Fedora Core 17. Everything worked out of the box (on both distro), but I like Fedora better, because it gives me more control over the machine.

I am having some difficulties in getting the AMD Catalyst 12.6 driver running for the dedicated GPU. The system is workable, just that I am not able to squeeze the best 3D from the card that I paid for. Which is good; were it not for the card, I would have been playing quake instead of tinkering with the kernel. Problems build character.

Here is my first bug report/note on Fedora with the 3.6.0 kernel not ready fr my computer (actually HP should be behind this not me :-) and here is my detailed specsheet on smolts.

Last couple of nights (and day), I have been struggling with getting the AMD driver to work (to no avail, yet). Here is me having some fun compiling the kernel after a long time. Look at how the quadcores are maxed out (and also note the 8 GB RAM lay underutilised).



















And then, finally - today evening - a glimpse of hope, after getting the spanking 3.6.0-rc1 kernel compiled and booting in. Well, the AMD problem is not solved yet, but I could zone into an incorrect driver module which was preventing the Fedora stock 3.5.0 kernel from working on my box.




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