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I own a HP Pavilion g6-2007TX laptop.

I have installed Ubuntu on my desktop and is working great there. Therefore I decided to do clean install on HP Laptop. I contacted HP, they said they don't have drivers for Linux OS.

I suppose that vendor specific drivers can be obtained (not sure though).

But I have heard that using Ubuntu machine gets heated up and it might cause hardware problems.

Therefore I am afraid to install.

I need suggestions.

Zanna
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Gaurav Dighe
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    In my case, I installed Ubuntu on my HP Pavilion ze5375 (a very long time ago), and it worked without any problem. Ubuntu generally works 'out of the box' in most cases. The only cases where you need drivers is with Nvidia or ATI cards, printers and some wireless network cards. The only downside with Ubuntu (in my case) was that the battery didn't last so long as in Windows, but I never experienced over-heating. – Alex Spataru Mar 11 '13 at 05:51
  • Hello,From where did y get drivers for HP Laptop compatible with Ubuntu?

    I can't find drivers such as HP CoolSense, Powermanager, webcam drivers, Dloby Sound Driver

     – Gaurav Dighe Mar 11 '13 at 09:07
  • As far as I know, your laptop has an AMD graphics card, so it may be useful to install extra drivers following this tutorial: http://askubuntu.com/questions/124292/what-is-the-correct-way-to-install-ati-catalyst-video-drivers-fglrx/129200#129200. A piece of advice tough, only install AMD and NVIDA drivers if you truly need them! – Alex Spataru Mar 17 '13 at 02:20
  • In the other hand, Ubuntu won't provide (and neither HP) drivers with the same level of customization as on Windows. On Linux, hardware will just work, but you wont be able to customize it the way you do it in Windows (at least without doing low-level stuff). – Alex Spataru Mar 17 '13 at 02:23

2 Answers2

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Try the Live version of the USB/CD. Linux kernel typically has the drivers you need. The live version of Ubuntu, aka Try Ubuntu, is the default option on the install disk. Once running it allows you to run "System Testing" your computer for compatibility.

System Testing: check if Ubuntu has the drivers for your system

Ubuntu also has pretty "sane" defaults -- and is quite stable and one of the most installed and tested desktop distrobutions. I suggest using Ubbuntu 12.04LTS -- as its most stable and will have security patches until 2017. But 12.10 might have more ubdated drivers if you have a particularly new laptop. In general HP has pretty good support for open source drivers.

mike stewart
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I also own an HP pavilion g6 laptop. I also had that overheating issue and very low battary lifetime issue with Ubuntu 13.04 and before. I solved both of those issues by simply turning off my discrete graphics card,i.e. AMD Radeon graphics card and leting ubuntu work with only intel card. You can do this as follows if you hope to use earlier version of ubuntu such as 13.04,12.10,12.04 so on and so forth.

chmod -R 705 /sys/kernel/debug 
chown -R <your_username>:<your_username> #replace <your_username> with your username
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

And also I had to include the above 3rd command in /etc/rc.local file to turn the AMD card off at every startup.

But now, Ubuntu 13.10 supports Hybrid Graphics(AMD Radeon and intel HD graphics), means that you can now switch graphics between AMD radeon and Intel HD graphics as in windows. For this you need to install fglrx drivers as follows.

sudo apt-get install fglrx fglrx-pxpress

Reboot the system and you can start Catalyst Control Center either in dash or from terminal. To start in terminal, run the following command.

sudo amdcccle

Remember to run this as root, otherwise you won't be able to switch graphics. And also, unlike in windows you need to reboot ubuntu after switching to make it work. I found this solution here, and it worked for me as crystal clear.

Hope this helps.

Deepal
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