Linux is Burning My Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Linux is Burning My Laptop

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34 pointscplat54 comments

Quoting from another thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971

<quote>

If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies. If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set).

</quote>

If you want your "discrete card off" to persist through restarts, you will have to add this to your rc.local

    modprobe radeon # Assuming ati card
    echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

For suspend/resume, you will have to add a new file /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00radeon-switch

    #!/bin/sh

    case "$1" in
        hibernate|suspend)
            echo ON > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
            ;;
        thaw|resume)
            echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
            ;;
        *)
            ;;
    esac
    exit 0

I have discovered putting the cpu policy to ondemand causes problems with pulseaudio(your volume icon will always be on mute and ps will show a pulseaudio process in D). I stopped fiddling with cpufreq, set it to performance, uninstalled cpufreq and was good to go.

And as I commented earlier, I will strongly advice against putting the hard disk in power saving mode.

>If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics.

Yes, best buy in my opinion is thinkpad with only intel graphics or if you have discrete graphics, turn it off in bios (it works as expected). There are no problems with (over)heating, everything works out-of-the-box. It seems that thinkpads are well supported in Linux as I've had no problems yet.

Or the best option: buy from a company that explicitly supports Linux, such as System76 or Zareason. Vote with your wallet!

I love thinkpads, it works wonderfully for *BSD too.

Thinkpads are good as a work computer, but if you're looking for personal computer (for watching movies, playing some games, looking at pictures), the screen on anything but x200 series is going to hurt. And that one is pretty overpriced I think (it has worse cost/performance ratio than MacBook Air, and that's something).

Which is really sad.

Even some ThinkPads are broken in this way though (x).

It's actually a bug in the laptop (hardware or firmware). It's just blamed on Linux when it doesn't happen to trigger on Windows.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/751689

If you have a laptop with Nvidia Optimus like mine (Intel and Nvidia cards), Bumblebee will help a lot with power management: http://bumblebee-project.org/

Would any of these 2 be a good candidate for Linux?

http://store.vizio.com/ct15a4.html#techspecs

http://www.novatech.co.uk/laptop/?s=3

Thanks

Seriously? Some poorly described problem with Ubuntu with irrelevant banter about wiping Windows 8 is making the front-page of Hacker News ?

Half of the top comments then become a mix of wild guesses towards a solution, and the other half become a "[Windows|OS X|BSD] is so much better because ...".

My thought exactly.

Do you use a Mac? I run Linux on a shipped-with-Windows laptop and I can relate to the author. I welcome the larger conversation.

The article is poorly written, it does not show that the author did any attempt at a problem analysis, much less searching the internet or a Ubuntu community forum.

How is that relevant for the larger Hacker News community? It does not even help you who is in the same situation, other than giving you the feeling you're not alone.

How does that have to do with what I'm running?

That one thing it does for me is quite redeeming.

For those of us who are toying with the idea of installing Linux on a laptop, it gives us a reminder that it's still not a carefree process. No, the author didn't figure out a solution to the problem, and instead just backed out of the Linux plan entirely. Frankly, I think that's an entirely fair decision. That's what I would have done, too. I suspect that's what most people would have done.

For those of us who want to advocate Linux on the desktop, or who want to take an active role in making Linux a better desktop environment, it's relevant in that it's valuable feedback about how people are perceiving the product. No, the author didn't end up figuring out the problem. As an end user, he shouldn't have to. It's the maker of the product who should be responsible for making sure it works. Perhaps they need more information, in which case Canonical would do very well to take charge of the situation by having someone contact the author to ask for more details about the situation, so that they can put some work into effecting a diagnosis and solution.

I wonder about this sometimes. Every laptop I've owned in the last ten years has had this problem to some extent with Linux. It's not just a heat issue, either. Using enough energy to generate all that heat means the battery never lasts very long either.

Occasionally something like this pops up and I wonder if this isn't a widespread problem.

If you want to run Linux on a laptop you really need to think of it in the same sort of terms as running OX X or something.

I wonder if a better idea would be for the installer in Ubuntu to do a cursory hardware check before installation and let you know what stuff might not work before proceeding.

It can't be good PR and leads to this "Wifi on Linux sucks!" "no it works fine" type threads on tech forums.

Having said that, I don't understand the problem with Linux wiping the Windows install? The only problem I have ever had is with Windows installs overwriting GRUB in the MBR.

You can usually dual boot both OSes with them both being blissfully unaware of each other. So I assume he's doing something weird there.

In this instance he says he didn't dual boot, he just installed Linux with the intent of destroying his Windows install.

I have no idea how his previous installs went wrong.

I do know that some machines have weird partitioning, and using the menu install of (eg) Fedora isn't easy in that situation. Since many machines have weird recovery partitions I'm gently surprised at Fedora for that oversight.

But, also, when I started using computers it was hard. I had to learn (I had to read it in a book) what "Ctrl C" meant. I was learning what a VDU was; the difference between RAM and discs; what High Density meant with discs. I had to learn about bat files and ANSI control codes and a bunch of stuff. And if I didn't learn I couldn't just give up and go back to the other OS that was working, because there wasn't one.

People spend years gaining knowledge about an OS and they tinker it to get it just right. It's going to take more than a week to get this new OS install perfect. (Having said that, it shouldn't take a week to get it installed.)

"However, whenever I used to install Linux along with Windows, it'd always mess up my Windows installation a few days later"

That's the confusing part, it's certainly possible to wipe out a partition by accident during install but to have it magically overwrite data at a later date is very odd.

I did this once. I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop, resizing the disk partition as I went. When I switched back to Windows, I realised I had left it hibernated and the partition resize upset it very much.

A day or so later, I tried to install some sound drivers in Ubuntu and somehow managed to uninstall xwindows entirely (I learnt to read and think before typing stuff in off a web site :)

A day later I rebuilt from the windows install disk and left things alone. I keep Linux on my servers, it's much happier there!

I guess he must have tried to mount NTFS partitions with some buggy filesystem driver, like the notorious default-but-deprecated kernel NTFS module.

Either that or he's just confusing MBR and MFT. His English is dubious at various stages, so it might as well be. Still, not a HN-worthy post, I wonder how it managed to hit the front-page -- everyone on holiday already?

If your laptop can't stand 100% CPU (and GPU) load for an indefinite time, you should consider it broken (or just very clogged up with dust). Anyway, it's very unlikely that Linux was persistently loading your system while it's supposed to be idle, so it's probably even more broken.

Or you just have no idea what you're talking about.

Or you could just read the laptop specs and see how they probably say "X GHz" and not "X GHz persistent load, Y GHz at peaks". Also look for things like "software has to downclock the CPU if it gets too hot". (btw, the Linux kernel does do that anyway for certain supported cpus, but this is just safety and not normal operation)

I had the same problem with my old Acer timelineX. CPU could hit 95oC quite happily and shut down. To be honest I just ran Linux in a virtual machine on it in the end. It made the difference between 10h and 2h of battery life as well.

This is not really linux's fault though. It has to fight with a hack job of an architecture, the mess that is ACPI and BIOS written by drunk monkeys. They really need to just fix PC architecture or get rid of it.

I had the same problem, though not to the point of safety shutdown.

Fiddling with vgaswitcheroo and acpi settings mitigated the problem. My laptop is much cooler and silent now.

This has been the biggest pain point in Linux for me so far. I am wondering why these problems persists. They have a huge impact on the (non-)adoption of Linux/Ubuntu.

I'm considering making a donation to ubuntu to improve this situation. What do you think?

I think you might rather donate to Debian, the distribution Ubuntu is based on. As far as I know, Ubuntu (and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu) does not commit a lot for upstream problems, so I do not know if it will be very efficient donating to them for this particular issue. By the way, I might encourage you to read this: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

Yes, I've read it, and it resonated quite strongly with my recently deteriorating ubuntu experience. The thing is, I don't feel like spending hours of system tuning on Debian like I used to do. Maybe I should give debian or gentoo another try and check if they fixed the problems they use to have. But this also takes time away from the funnier stuff like programming and creation.

> I am wondering why these problems persists.

Because hardware manufacturers do not care about linux compatibility or standards. They seemingly only care about windows compatibility. ACPI/DSDT woes are one reason I'm slightly interested in UEFI, which possibly could bring some clarity to the situation. Or at least less buggy implementations.

don't bother donating to ubuntu. they don't fix bugs. they just add new "features" instead that break so many other things you forget about the initial bug altogether. try out debian or linux mint or any other distro. ubuntu is for sadists.

By far the easiest way to run desktop/laptop linux and to not loose your mental health is to pick your hardware carefully. Make sure that the components have solid drivers in the mainline kernel and you will be happier in the long run.

so, is there a site to check which laptops have the best linux support today?

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

I've never had that problem until I bought my current laptop about 2 years ago.

Gnome 3 seems to make things worse because of the 3D effects (switching between vim and Firefox seems enough to turn the fan on). I'm Ardour user and almost in every recording session I get at lest one safety shutdown because of the temperature. It's very frustrating!

I've never used Windows on that laptop, so I can't compare, but I always thought the hardware was to blame.

Yesterday I was preparing a external disk and during Debian Squeeze installation the laptop had to shutdown twice because of temperature, so now I'm not sure it's just a hw issue. Looks like something is definitely wrong.

EDIT: well, surprisingly I never tried to google the problem (I know, I know), and apparently there are lots of reports of that laptop model overheating with no reason. Great :(

broken hardware and bad driver support is not a linux fault...

if you blame someone for something than blame the right people not the one that are trying hard to give you something better for free!

I got a zenbook with a intel hd4000 and i get better battrylife and no overheat than on windows...

I switched to using Ubuntu for all my web development work about a year ago. I even ran Ubuntu on a £200 desktop with 8GB RAM until I upgraded to Win 8.

But all my work is done in a VM using Virtual Box. I switch between two desktops and a laptop regularly and run multiple VMs. I don't waste time reinstalling my base OS, I just import my VM image and get working.

My 2008 MacBook Pro is struggling a little, but not just with the VM and it's limited to 4GB RAM. Having at least 8GB RAM makes it all work much, much better. I get the joy of Linux, Windows and OSX with surprisingly very little headache. And I use Git to synchronise all my work.

"However, whenever I used to install Linux along with Windows, it'd always mess up my Windows installation a few days later. Last time, fiddling with Linux made me lose my Master File Table. I had all the files, but just didn't know where they begun and ended."

I've been running linux on various devices for 16 years, and as a primary OS for about 7 or 8. I have never had this happen.

What does this guy do to his machines?

Laptop support can be a bit variable, but I've not really had problems there other than the odd SD reader not being supported.

For my next computer, I would like to buy a linux laptop, because I do not want to give my money to people who hurt me (Microsoft). Are there any laptop where linux works well (every peripheral work perfectly and power management is as good as windows) ? I am not a gamer, I do not tweak much my system (I do not touch unless it is broken). The applications I use frequently are Chrome, Eclipse, virtualbox, XMBC, LibreOffice and Wine (for photoshop and home made old utilities). Any advice to not burn ?

There's a real difficulty in getting a laptop with linux or with no OS. There are a few specialist companies that do it, and Dell (US only AFAICT) has released an Ubuntu Ultrabook. BUT, the ultrabook with Ubuntu is more expensive than the same model with windows 8.

I don't want to give cash to MS either, but I don't really understand the economics here.

Aside from the usual thing about companies paying to have crapware installed on new Windows laptops, I'm guessing there's an economies of scale thing going on. Linux laptops ship enough fewer units that each one has to cover a much larger share of the fixed costs involved in getting a model to market.

That's why I have a Lenovo s300 with an Intel HD graphics card only. Best Linux laptop I've ever owned.

All the laptops I'm currently owning run fine and cool, except the one with ATI graphics. The open source radeon driver has broken power management and ATI stopped support for the GPU in it with the Catalyst driver.

I have a MacBook Air running Ubuntu in a virtual machine. All the hardware stuff is handled by OSX, but I get the power and flexibility of Linux. With 8 GB of RAM, memory is not much of an issue.

What VM are you using, if you don't mind me asking? I got severe performance problems with a 2008 macbook pro with 8GB of memory, running VirtualBox or vmware fusion.

I also had severe performance problems with VirtualBox on Windows but they were magically fixed by increasing the number of virtual CPUs from 1 to 2. I am talking 10-20 times performance boost just by doing that and nothing else. Maybe the same will help you. I blogged about it here: http://thoughtflow.dk/2012/12/07/prevent-slow-linux-performa...

VirtualBox, with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM for each OS. There are some CPU settings you need to change in VirtualBox, I don't remember them now but experiment, it made things 10x faster.

Right now I'm running multiple OSes on a system with hybrid graphics, but I'd love to have a laptop designed/tweaked for Linux. Either a System76 or "bunny" Huang's latest design.

As the first couple of comments on that page says, it's a high chance that this is due to problems with power management in the open-source Radeon driver.

I've been running Debian and Ubuntu on lots of different laptops the last fifteen years, and only ever had problems with overheating on laptops with AMD/ATI graphics and the Radeon driver. If the graphics chip is current enough, installing the proprietary Catalyst driver should fix the problem.

Most likely he can fix the problems by installing proprietary drivers.

However, since he still needs to install the OS first (and as I understand it, it crashes during install), so my suggestion is to put the computer inside the refridgerator whilst installing. Low-tech but it will cool the GPU significantly, and thus allow installation to finish.

Just keep the laptop elevated(may be place a book beneath it) so that its air vents are clear and it will be mostly fine.

> so my suggestion is to put the computer inside the refridgerator whilst installing.

    laptop CPU/GPU gets hot
    fan kicks in
    cold air gets sucked in
    cold meets hot
    condensation and drama ensues

If only Dell's Project Sputnik[1] wasn't so expensive and the resolution wasn't so terrible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847720

I have a similar experience but running Linux on a VM. There was a background process (related to X Windows) using more than 10% of the CPU all the time.

"I love my Windows 8, mind you. The boot time of 15 seconds is a life-saver."

If the 15 seconds boot time had saved my life, I wouldn't be mucking about with linux...

I guess learning that there's a feature called "hibernation" would give OP the rapture...

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