Hi guys, I’ve got a HP 15-bw037na laptop with 2gb dedicated AMD graphics and I’m looking to get rid of windows and go back to Ubuntu as this laptop is purely for web development and I think I’d prefer having Ubuntu. Only issue I have is that I can’t find any information for AMD drivers for my laptop and don’t want to wipe and install Ubuntu to just run straight into problems. Anyone have any experience with this laptop or even AMD laptop graphics drivers for 16.04/17.10
The above is a good bet, but I will warn you about my experience with the HP Envy 15z-ah100 my brother has that we’ve tried to put linux on. That’s also an AMD APU one (A10 something). A couple of us tried a year or two ago without a lot of luck, as the install would go through but then when selecting Ubuntu it would go to either a black screen or one with just the blinking place marker but no prompt for anything. There may have been some compatibility problems with the kernel or something at the time though.
Tried last weekend with a newer version and was eventually able to get things going after figuring out how to get to the proper boot options menu for the HP, which turned out to list the Xubuntu OS boot and Windows as options and booted in properly, but looks like something went wrong during the several attempts my brother had tried to install while it would variously try to boot into Xubuntu and freeze somewhere or would just boot into Windows 10 which he still had on it for now. Xubuntu was also unable to recognize that there even was a Windows install in the installer, which was odd, so we did custom partitioning.
Anyway, once it was going, I was trying to make some adjustments and most applications couldn’t load. Turned out it was reporting the 40GB partition the system was on was completely full somehow. That could have been a result of other things, so I’m going to try again and do everything myself super clean. Drivers didn’t seem to be a problem, but I haven’t gotten very far with trying to load up AMD graphics drivers other than the defaults yet. Hopefully things work out better on your specific model, but be aware there may be some trickery, and you may need to lookup what the right keys are to get into the menus you actually want.
I am trying to install Kubuntu on my laptop right now to having several problems too. Except I have a Nvidia 670M installed as the GPU. It isn’t going to be easy, but I have one suggestion that might help you. Get a friend to compile the latest stable Linux kernel into whatever distribution of Linux you want. If that isn’t possible then try the latest long-term supported version, which I believe in @woddell case would be 16.04.3. The reason I would stay away from 17.04 and 17.10 is on the Ubuntu website they caution everyone to not use those versions for a laptop. In my case, I am waiting for my friend to finish making a custom bootable USB stick, but I am confident from my previous experience trying to install Linux on this laptop my custom bootable Linux USB stick will work.
Also, I forgot to mention do your self a favor and not try and install Linux and Windows on the same drive, that is if you are trying to set up a dual boot system.
Well what GPU is it? AMDGPU supports 250/260/270(X)/280/290/295, the mobile versions of those, 360/380/390, the mobile and in betweens of those (385 etc), RX, and vega. But if you have an older HD card then the normal Radeon driver handles that. You don’t need to install a driver they’re just built in.
And in case you’re worrying, a lot of the work that AMD puts into AMDGPU gets back ported to Radeon so a lot of the performance you would think your chip would have is going to be there (unlike in windows where it gets nuked).