Installing Fedora 17 on HP Envy 4-1030us

[hmaarrfk]

I got an HP Envy 4-1030us and I wanted to share my experience installing Fedora 17 on it.

Hardware

• Intel® Core™ i5-3317U (1.7 GHz )
• Intel HD Graphics 4000 (up to 1.65 GB)
• 4 GB DDR3
• 500 GB SATA (5400 rpm)
• 32 GB Solid State Drive cache
• 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
• Intel 802.11b/g/n (2x2); Bluetooth; WiDi
• 2 SuperSpeed USB 3.0; 1 USB 2.0; 1 HDMI; 1 headphone-out; 1 microphone-in; 1 RJ45
• Digital media card reader
• 14" diagonal HD BrightView LED-backlit (1366 x 768)
• Full-size, island-style, backlit
• HP TrueVision HD Webcam (720p)
• Beats Audio; 2 speakers; 1 subwoofer
• Clickpad (touchpad but the whole thing clicks)

What works out of the box

• Ethernet Port (Gigabit speeds tested by usvyatsky)
• Backlight keyboard
• Clickpad (right and left clicks works, multifinger stuff need to be enabled through gnome-shell)
• USB ports (only tested with USB2.0 devices)
• Webcam
• Internal Microphone
• SSD
• Harddrive
• Some keyboard function keys
• Capslock LED
• HDMI out
• Sound through HDMI (Simply enable the sound output from the HDMI port in the sound settings)
• Keyboard special/function keys

What works after minor effort

• LCD Backlight on boot (without modifications, the screen has 0 brightness on bootup) -- Works out of the box in F18
• HP Beats sub-woofer (well maybe you need this modification, the "sub-woofer" isn't all that great as we would expect) -- Works out of the box in F18
• Wireless adapter -- Works out of the box in F18
• SD Card reader

What does not work

• The mute LED
• The touchpad disabled LED
• WiDi -- No Linux support from Intel's behalf.

Note: windows uses Super+F1 as the help key combination, so this keyboard just sends that when you press fn+f1. It probably does the same for what looks like the display key. So i don't think these keys can be used as XF11XXXXXX keys.

What was not tested:

• USB 3 speeds on the USB 3 ports

I'll be updating this post with the howto, but most of it can be found on threads about other laptops which I will be giving credit to.

Note: I think you should be able to get some SSD caching capabilities, but I didn't have time to fully get that working before getting tired of it and simply installing fedora on the 500Gig Hard disk. It isn't so easy getting into the intel raid controller (firmware), I think the drives need to be either blank or pre formatted to RAID. If someone knows anything about this, it would be greatly helpful. There is also this tool called bcache that seems to do this SSD caching in the kernel (software caching) but I don't think it came in the Fedora 17 Live CD.


Note: Installing Fedora 17 on this computer may cause you to lose your Windows Partition. I tried (for about an hour) to let Fedora work with the partition in the RAID but it was unable to make sense of them so I got tired and just wiped the whole thing. My experience has been that booting into those other partitions (HP recovery and whatnot) becomes basically impossible after installing Linux (never tried installing Windows). I would suggest making backup disks, but I haven't even done that to be honest.

Tweaks:
Backlight at boot:
Works Out of the Box on Fedora 18


This is a problem with grub or the kernel or something, it doesn't detect the proper controller for the laptop backlights.

There is an easy fix:

Edit file: /etc/default/grub and add the parameter

acpi_backlight=vendor

to the parameter: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX. Mine is now:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 SYSFONT=True  KEYTABLE=us rd.luks=0 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rhgb quiet acpi_backlight=vendor"

Then you should regenerate the grub2 config

grub2-mkconfig > /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

This problem is somewhat documented at the following locations

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753012
• http://linuxenvy.blogspot.com/2011/0...l#comment-form « Not a very good fix, my fix is better

Beats Audio
The sound seems ok out of the box in Fedora 18.

Not too sure if this does the trick, but you can try to add

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-zephyr

at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf (you might need to create the file yourself if it does not exist).

Others have documented that the following line works

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1020331

Wireless Adapter
Works out of the box in Fedora 18

kept my old way at the bottom, but I think the better way would be to connect to a wired connection and run

yum install -y iwl2030-firmware.noarch

It is in the updates repo (assuming that is the fedora-updates repository)

You could also simply download the rpm.

If you have an other computer with fedora on it, run

yumdownloader iwl2030-firmware.noarch

Then bring it to your new computer on a usb and install it from the RPM with yum.

If you only have a non-fedora computer, you should be able to browses the fedora repos in a web browser and download it like that.

You can also download it from here
http://pkgs.org/fedora-17/fedora-upd...oarch.rpm.html

SD Card reader
The SD card reader does not work out of the box.
I reported the bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=854762
Follow tips on comment 3.


Gentoo documented the bug here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...4-start-0.html
Ubuntu Does it nicely here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ks/+bug/971876



Power Saving Tips
Install powertop, and apply all the changes.
See this to learn how to make the changes to powertop permanent. It works. you just have to put the file in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and change the permissions to executable.

Clickpad (Touchpad)
Technically it is a clickpad since the whole thing clicks down.

People have been talking about this package called mtrack as an alternative to synaptics. Apparently it supports more complicated things like gestures and is simply more modern. But nobody packaged it for fedora and compiling it was a pain so I gave up.

I won't paste my xorg configuration file unless somebody asks for it since I think it is less than perfect ideal.

Keyboard function keys
By default, the function keys are mapped to the special functions if you don't press anything (à la mac style). If you prefer the function keys to be mapped to f1-f12 by default, simply change that in the bios (press escape quickly during the first second of the boot process).

[usvyatsky]

Thanks hmaarrfk.
Would you mind sharing what exactly have you tweaked?

Here's my experience so far:

Got Fedora 17 installed on external USB3.0 disk on ENVY 4-1030US.

Couple of notes:

1. Had to use external HDMI monitor initially, edited /etc/grub.cfg to include 'nomodeset' option in linux boot parameters. Otherwise, screen would stay black - suspect a conflict between video drivers built into kernel and loadable ones.
2. Had to install the latest updates to enable wireless card.
3. Gig-E network card works.
4. Ditto HDMI.
5. Still have not figured out how to configure md to work with Intel Rapid Start RAID (SSD used as cache for HDD to speed up boot). The goal is to (eventually) shrink original Windows partition, install Fedora on the freed space on the RAID and run Windows in KVM using original image.

Any tips for making md happy with Intel RAID are more than welcome!

[hmaarrfk]

Hi usvyatsky,

Did you ever test sound through HDMI?

Also, you can simply change the brightness after your laptop boots with the fn keys, it is rather difficult to guess when that occurs but that is what I did for a few days until I got around to fixing it.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a straightforward way to get the harddrive caching to work. Here are some of the notes I managed to gather, maybe you will have more luck than I did.

On an other note, I was no longer able to access the Intel RAID configuration utility (don't know if you ever booted in it, it kinda looks like an grub screen but with more colours) after I formatted my drive, I have a feeling it is because I stripped both my harddrives of the metadata and installed fedora on the harddisk.

Harddrive Cache
See http://download.intel.com/design/int...ERS/326024.pdf , Intel's document, and http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../cs-020663.htm

http://blogsh.de/2012/08/29/fedora-1...-xps-15-l521x/ ,this guy did something similar to my build but for ubuntu.

bchache: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linu...ache.devel/315

http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ , bcache seems like the favorite solution, although I still don't understand how to use it for multiple harddrives. It might actually be very easy but destructive at the same time so I would rather hold off.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=282007 , Fedora 17 with Asus UX32VD.
http://superuser.com/questions/39007...rger-hard-disk , Q&A

[[http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linu...ache.devel/315 ]]

I couldn't read anywhere how to get bcache working on the root and home partition, it also seems like it is not installed in Fedora 17 so I won't really bother.

[usvyatsky]

Thanks hmaarrfk!
I'll continue poking around for a solution for the caching RAID issue - after all, this was one of the main reasons I chose this model.
I never tested sound over HDMI - I do not have a device for that.
BTW, would you mind sharing the fix for brightness issue?
I had a sneaking suspicion that my 'nomodeset' fix is too brutal and now I see that it is indeed.
Kudos for using the brightness function keys - I wouldn't even think about it.

[hmaarrfk]

I agree, not being able to cache to the SSD is a real bummer.

I think you are going to have an even harder time playing around with it if you don't want to lose your Windows data.

Since you still have windows, could you let me know at what temperature your CPU runs under Windows.

In a well air conditioned room I am usually able to do some light work with some flash music player running at about 55 C.

I also noticed, that if I turn on all the optimizations in powertop, I was able to get about 5 hours of battery life with a modest backlight brightness (not very scientific, I know).

[usvyatsky]

Just downloaded CoreTemp and according to it I am running with both cores within 48-62C range.
The load is somewhat light - a VirtualBox w/a couple of Fedora machines + Firefox + Skype + a bunch of Putty terminals.
BTW, I replaced original 4GB RAM DIMM with an 8GB one (bought 2x8GB, but apparently this ultrabook cannot have more than 8GB, at least w/Windows, will try w/Fedora later).

[hmaarrfk]

Alright, so it seems that Fedora doesn't do so bad in terms of overheating the computer.

... keep me posted on the RAM issue, I was going to upgrade it to 16Gigs when I get those Mail In Rebates Office Depot owes me.

See
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Hardwar...1817243/page/2
For the 16Gig problem...... man, so misleading.......

Knowing all these companies with like 102938109283 models, this will probably never get fixed and get ignored because it only affects a small number of their customers.....

[Jean Pierre]

I am faced with the same situation on a hp laptop envy-4-1062sf which I would like to dual boot and have it sharing NTFS files, even not using the SSD. Currently I am using a Knoppix live-usb (kernel 3.4.9), trying to understand.

The main question I have is how to disable the SSD cacheing without harming Windows, (or else how to get the same cacheing actions in both systems). What can be the consequence of disabling the "Intel Rapid Start Technology" in the bios. Has something to be done in Windows before or after having disabled the option ? I do not really understand whether the cacheing is done by the firmware and transparent to the OS, or whether the firmware just sends signals for the OS to manage the cacheing (probably the OS knows better what is frequently read and rarely written).

Did you (hmaarrfk or usvyatsky) disable the IRST ?

Here is a reference to an apparently successful double booting :
http://finiteline.blogspot.fr/2012/0...envy-6-or.html

Trying to image the Windows 7 partition fails because it is not consistent : a few clusters are marked as allocated, but are not used by any file. Digging into the allocated clusters, I saw that they were last allocated to a system file named :
$Extend/$RmMetadata/$Txf/0000000000002B27
This make me fear some Windows specific way of dealing with the cache, not compatible with sharing access to files. The reference above mentions flushing the metadata with "dmraid -rE /dev/sdb", but I would think a Windows command to be needed to flush Windows data.

Hints welcome.

[hmaarrfk]

Hi Jean Pierre,

Before disablign SSD caching in the BIOS, I would disable it in Windows 7 itself. You should see some Intel utilities that will allow you to manage your RAID (well not really raid, but it is part of that family so I think they call it RAID).
Once disabled from windows though, your main hard drive will still be formatted for use in this special RAID. Since they do not provide drivers for Linux, I do not think that Linux has any way of interpretting how the hard drive is partitionned or what it contains.

It should be possible to just wipe it all and reinstall windows, then linux, but I didn'T even bother keeping linux on it.

I know I didnt give you anything concrete, but I hope this can help you.


Edit: From the link you found, it seems that after disablign SSD caching from within windows, he was able to view the partition table from within linux. that may or may not be true, but for your case I wish it is. Good luck

[Jean Pierre]

Just wanting to mention a new howto set up a dual-boot on this family of computers, posted on http://askubuntu.com/questions/15964...-envy-4-1002tx It appears to be possible to keep Windows 7 alive after deleting the fake-RAID metadata.

[socratien]

Hello, I've just bought a HP envy 4 1070sf
I want to install F17 on it and I have faced the same problem of black screen at the beginning of the installation. so I 'm reticent to install F17
Could you please confirm F17 works well on this type of laptop ? what is exactly the workaround with fn functions to display the installation process?
I did not understand the impact of SSD and RAID cache issue. Could you explain what it means for a lambda user of F17 please?
Thank you in advance

[hmaarrfk]

If you are comfortable with linux, you can try editing your bootstring when you boot from the live CD.

Go to troubleshooting or something. and edit the boot string. You can add the fix at the end of it. I've done it before, the bootstring fix should work. This is really a Intel Driver fix, and if your computer has an intel card, it should work.



The impact of the SSD and RAID cache issue is that you because there is no official support for Linux, you have to disable it before installing Linux. Depending on how much you value keeping windows (or the original windows installation,) it might be a hassle to install Fedora.

Anyway, as with any Linux install, it is always wise to create recovery media and backup your data.

[socratien]

Ok , to edit the boot string I must connect my laptop with a video monitor by hdmi and launch the installation, go to troubleshooting menu and add 'nomodeset' cmd line in the grub.cfg file
After that, it should work? That's it?

I made a recovery media for windows. must I do anything about RAID cache please?

[Jean Pierre]

Ok , to edit the boot string I must connect my laptop with a video monitor by hdmi and launch the installation, go to troubleshooting menu and add 'nomodeset' cmd line in the grub.cfg file
After that, it should work? That's it?

I did not need to do that. However the luminosity cannot be adjusted by F2/F3. I have seen a solution posted in https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1070065 (see #3), which I have not tried yet.

must I do anything about RAID cache please?

Yes, you must disable it by "dmraid -r -E /dev/sda". See the link I posted on Oct 10. The same way works with Fedora.

[socratien]

Jean-Pierre
To do what you advise, Fedora should be already installed on my laptop, should not?
or my problem is to install fedora, since i can't see the installation steps with a black screen :-)