HP Pavilion dv7-7008tx Laptop- Ubuntu 14.04/Linux Mint 17.1 Drivers

 

HP Pavilion dv7-7008tx Laptop- Ubuntu 14.04 /Linux Mint 17.1 Drivers

At first glances, when installing Ubuntu 14.04 on the 7008tx everything looks like it is working fine.  You are able to boot into the system fine, sound and WIFI appear to be working, however, after a while you will begin asking yourself, why are my games running like crap, why is my sound so crap or why is the screen at full brightness everytime I bohttps://askubuntu.com/questions/302340/is-there-a-way-to-enable-beats-audio-from-within-linux/309807#309807ot.  After a few weeks using Ubuntu I have managed to solve almost all these issues and more.

Ethernet Card (Working)

• Works out of the box 

 

Blu-ray Drive (Working)

• DVD Disk - Working
• Blu-ray Disk - Not Tested

 

USB Ports (Working)

• 3 X USB 3.0 - (Tested with 2.0 device)
• 1 x USB 2.0 - (Tested with 2.0 device)

 

VGA Port (Working)

• Works out of the box

 

PC Card Slot (Pending Test)

• Not Tested

 

WIFI Card (Working)

• Using vendor drivers out of the box by default which is good because without them this card doesn't work.  I have used it on other Linux distributions so I know; I needed to compile my own drivers on openSUSE.

 

Bluetooth (Working)

• Tested with bluetooth headset. I did however need to open the "Sound" application and select the bluetooth device as the output device, it didn't do that automatically.

 

Webcam (Working)

• Tested in Skype

 

HDMI Port (Working) 

•  Display - Working when connected to TV

•  Audio - Working when connected to TV, however, it did not automatically start using the TV speakers when I connected it.  I needed to open the "Sound" application and change the default output device to HDMI.

 

Audio (Action Required)

• Speakers and Sub-woofer - Awful sound and sub-woofer not working.
• FIX:  here, now it sounds awesome.

• Microphone-in - Working

• Headphone-out - Working

 

Function Keys (Working)

Amazingly all these work.

• F2/F3 - Brightness (Action Required - See below)
  
• F4 - Toggle Display (Working)
• F6/F7/F8 - Audio Controls (Working in Rhythmbox Music Player)
• F9/F10/F11 - Volume Controls (Working)
• F12 - Toggle WIFI (Working)

 

Graphics Card (Action Required)

It turns out the 7008tx actually has 2 graphics cards.

• An Intel card for everyday use that is energy efficient.
• An NVIDIA card for games and graphics intensive operations.

This technology is called optimus and the cards will switch between one another to allow the best of both worlds when it comes to battery saving compared with performance.

There is no support for this in the drivers supplied by NVIDIA and instead we need to use an application called bumblebee to do this for us.

You can install bumblebee from here, be sure to follow the instructions for Ubuntu 13.10 and later.

Reboot.

You can also install a graphical utility which allows you to preset different utilities to use bumblebee (see the accepted answer here).  Be sure to add the bumblebee indicator to "Startup Applications" so it will start when you boot your PC.  You also need to copy the bumblebee icons into your ~/.icons folder.

mkdir ~/.icons
cp ~/git/bumblebee-ui/icons/*.svg ~/.icons

To test the different frame rates and ensure everything is working.

sudo apt-get install virtualgl

Then run:

glxspheres64

You should see a frame rate of about 65 - 70 FPS.  Now use the NVIDIA card:

vblank_mode=0 primusrun glxspheres64

You should see a frame rate of around  270 - 330 FPS.

To access the NVDIA settings you will need to run the following, I added it to a bash script so I din't need to remember it:

optirun -b none nvidia-settings -c :8 

Fingerprint Reader (Action Required)

Wouldn't it be great if you could use the fingerprint scanner to login and to authenticate you via sudo instead of that clumsy password.  The good news is that you can.

Download the following deb file from this discussion.

Follow the instructions in the accepted answer here. But instead of using the .deb file he supplied, use the one you downloaded above because his did not work for me.

Enable fingerprint authentication on your user account, reboot and now you have a fully working fingerprint reader.

 

Screen Brightness (Action Required)

Each time you restart your computer the screen brightness gets reset to full.  This is annoying because I prefer a very dull back-light.  The other problem is that when you use the F2/F3 keys to change the brightness you will notice that  there are only about 4-5 different brightness settings.

• To fix the brightness controls follow the instructions here 

• To save your current brightness setting on each boot:

Change to your desired default brightness setting then run:

cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

This will output a numerical value that represents your current brightness.

Edit /etc/rc.local and add the following line to the bottom just before the exit 0 statement:

echo 976 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightnesss

Where 976 was your brightness number.  Now your setting will be preserved after each reboot.

 

Hibernation (Action Required)

By default, Ubuntu will disable hibernation unless the computer is certified to support it.   If you open the "Power" application, you will notice that the "Hibernate" option is greyed out.

To get it working follow the instructions here

 

The End

As you can see, what originally looked like a working system was not working that well at all.  Hopefully this has helped someone else get their 7008tx (or a variant of the HP Pavilion family) up and running quicker than I did.  If you have any improvements or suggestions or just a success story post a comment below. Also, if you are able to confirm some of my "Not Tested" scenarios, leave a comment below and I will update my post.

Dual booting Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows on the HP Pavilion dv7-7008tx Laptop

I recently installed Ubuntu on my HP so that I could eventually replace it as my primary OS.  As always, a few issues cropped up.

The 7008tx comes with 2 x 1TB hard drives with RAID support.  By default (as far as I can tell) none of the RAID features are being used.

sda (1TB) - Installed on here is the Windows 7 OS along with a few other partitions for HP tools and recovery.

sdb (32GB) - this is a small 32 GB SSD drive that helps windows boot faster.

sdc (1TB) - This is the spare drive which is exactly the same size as sda and as such would allow RAID mirroring etc.  By default there is no RAID running and is represented as the D: drive in Windows. I figured I could wipe this and install Ubuntu on this drive.

Something else weird about the 7008tx is that if you open your BIOS you will see that there is only a single hard drive to boot from, not three as you would expect.  I don't know why this is but it took me three days to get the boot process worked out in an acceptable way as described below.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that the traditional BIOS is on the way out and UEFI is the future.  When I installed Ubuntu I used the default partitioning option and it installed using EFI mode.  The problem with this was I had to press ESC at boot then F9 and choose the "Laptop Hard Drive" option if I wanted to boot Windows 7, otherwise, it would automatically boot into GRUB.  I tried multiple times and with multiple configurations to get Windows 7 into the GRUB menu but it just didn't work.  This was really annoying.

It turned out to be a problem with the way Ubuntu and Windows 7 were installed.  Windows 7 was installed using the legacy BIOS mode and Ubuntu was using EFI.  The solution was to reinstall Ubuntu and manually partition the sdc so that is would install in BIOS mode instead of EFI mode. 

When installing Ubuntu, choose manual partitioning and setup something like the following on sdc.  The size of /root and /home is up to your.

- 12GB SWAP
- 50GB EXT4 for /root
- The remaining space EXT4 for /home

I selected sda (The Windows Drive) as the location to install the bootloader thinking that this would then allow me to use GRUB and add the Window 7 menu item.  When the install finished and I restarted, it booted straight into Windows again. As this was probably about day 3 by now, I decided to instead accept that I was not going to get GRUB to boot and use the Windows 7 bootloader to boot Ubuntu instead.

I used a software package called EasyBSD for windows to add a new menu item for Ubuntu.

Once installed

• Click "Add new Entry"
• Select Linux/BSD
• Select GRUB2
• Change the name to Ubuntu
• In the Drive section, select the partition you installed /root on.  For me it was Disk 1 (partition 2).
• Click "Add Entry" and reboot

Amazingly, when selecting the Ubuntu menu item from the Windows Boot Loader, it booted up.  

So now it is installed and we can boot into Ubuntu, checkout my next post on configuring Ubuntu to recognise the drivers and settings needed to take full advantage of your 7008tx hardware here.