These things happen in predictable patterns. Due to hardware issues I land in Fedora, and after six months it's time for something else.

Not that Fedora 18 and now 19 haven't been great, because they have.

But I'm wary of my AMD APU-based HP laptop's trouble with suspend/resume and 3D acceleration. I had both working for a very short time during the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta's brief run.

But before that I had neither, and now I have decent 3D with AMD Catalyst but seemingly no hope of working suspend/resume with this AMD A4-4300M APU and its AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

And I'm getting tired of new kernels coming into Fedora, some with Catalyst support, some without. And it's past time that this AMD GPU (I think it's the Trinity family) get better support from the kernel and the free and proprietary drivers.

What I'm saying is that if the hardware support I need is not going to come soon, I'd like something more stable while I'm waiting.

So I started auditioning new Linux distributions yesterday.

And when Debian 7.1 and 7.2 Live DVDs both allowed me to successfully suspend/resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, I was firmly pulled back into the Debian camp. To my "home" distro.

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I thought you could take care of turning off suspend when the laptop lid is shut under GNOME 3 by using GNOME Tweak Tool. That doesn't work.

Automatic suspend when the lid is closed doesn't work for me because suspend/resume doesn't function on my HP hardware, and I'd like to close the damn lid every once in awhile without having to do a hard boot afterward.

It's the little things.

So I dug in a bit and found out in the Fedora Forum what you have to do (thanks to forum poster jvroig):

In a terminal:

su -
cd /etc/systemd/
gedit logind.conf

Once you're in logind.conf, uncomment (i.e. remove the #) on this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

Then change "suspend" to "lock"

It should now read like this:

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the logind.conf file.

Once you reboot, closing the lid should lock the screen and not suspend the laptop.

Note: Xfce doesn't suffer from the same inability as GNOME 3 to control what happens when you close the laptop lid.

Alternate instructions if you want to use vi and sudo:

Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo vi /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Change this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

to this (remove #, replace suspend with lock):

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the file in vi, then reboot.

As much as I love Debian, I have had less trouble running Fedora 18 and 19 than Debian Wheezy, video issues notwithstanding (as those are affecting me across all platforms).

Part of this, no doubt, may be due to improvements in Xfce 4.10 (the default in Fedora 19) over version 4.8 (in Debian Wheezy).

But overall Fedora's stability is remarkable, especially because it has a reputation for being less so.

For reasons that escape me, AMD has changed the structure of its web site -- and changed the link where we all can find out about its latest Catalyst proprietary video driver for Linux:

Here is the new link.

From the bottom of that page, you can drill down to the specs on the latest beta driver.

As always, you can (and should) follow RPM Fusion's latest Catalyst (and Nvidia) packages.

I was reading today about how the Korora spin on Fedora includes Handbrake, the popular cross-platform video transcoding/DVD-ripping utility.

But I am running regular Fedora 19, albeit with proprietary-package assistance from RPM Fusion and a few other repositories.

Still, Handbrake isn't in any of those repos.

So I searched and found HandBrake for Fedora GNU/Linux on Sourceforge.

The installation from the RPM was quick, and now I have Handbrake.

In a very much related matter, Korora looks like a great way to get Fedora with all the multimedia bits set up for you. The distribution's What's Inside page discusses what Korora adds to Fedora in a sort of roundabout way.

Aside from automatic installation of all the multimedia codecs and outside repositories, Korora includes the Jockey proprietary driver manager, which I could really use given all the trouble I've been having with my AMD APU's video component.

The releases are popping out of AMD in hot/heavy fashion. Just about a week after the proprietary AMD Catalyst 13.10 beta video driver for Linux was released, today AMD's Web site is pushing the 13.11 beta.

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Update on Oct. 8, 2013: In the past day or so, AMD has revised its Radeon/Linux page to reflect that the Catalyst beta it is offering for download is version 13.10. Hopefully this means we are closer to a new stable release of the proprietary video driver as well as a new package from RPM Fusion (which you can watch for here).

Original entry from Oct. 2, 2013:

AMD has released a new beta of its Catalyst video driver for Linux.

You wouldn't know it by looking at AMD's Catalyst for Linux driver page (though the 13.8 beta link points to the 13.10 beta zip file).

But you would know it by looking at the separate page announcing the 13.10 beta.

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Warning: The AMD Catalyst 13.9 Linux video driver was on the site this morning but has disappeared since then. As of 4 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 19, 2013, it has not yet reappeared. AMD, it's your move.

Before the driver disappeared, here is what I wrote:

Now that the 3.11 version of the Linux kernel is available on my Fedora 19 system, AMD has released a new version of its closed-source, stable driver, version 13.9, that brings support to ... the 3.10 kernel.

Not that I haven't been running the 13.6 (suspend/resume worked) and 13.8 betas (suspend/resume didn't work in 13.8 beta 1, not sure about beta 2), because I have.

You can download the new driver here, though I recommend NEVER installing from what AMD provides and always, ALWAYS using a version packaged for your distribution, which for Fedora means the packages provided by RPM Fusion.

Running Fedora and needing AMD Catalyst for working 3D graphics means willfully ignoring new kernels that aren't yet supported and accompanied by a new kmod-catalyst package. That's what I'm doing with the new 3.11.1 kernel that moved into Fedora 19 today. I won't install a 3.11 kernel until there's a corresponding kmod-catalyst package from RPM Fusion to go with it. And given that this new 13.9 release of AMD Catalyst only supports the 3.10 kernel and isn't yet in the RPM Fusion repository (which, given the fact that it was just released, I totally understand), I'll wait for the next kmod-catalyst to roll onto my machine and once again test suspend-resume. If it works (like it did during the brief 13.6 beta window), I'll be of a mind to stick with the 3.10 kernel for a good long while.

But if suspend-resume doesn't work with the combination of Linux kernel 3.10.x and Catalyst 13.9, it'll be back on the beta train until AMD decides to better-support the GPUs it makes, including my AMD Radeon HD 7420g.

Potential problem: I just checked the AMD page, and the new driver is (hopefully temporarily) gone.

I'm watching for new AMD video drivers for Linux, both the open-source driver that ships with most Linux distributions and the closed-source Catalyst driver from AMD that you can install with between a little and a lot of difficulty (and potential heartache).

Since I'm running Fedora, mainly because its developers are very pro-active in pushing new code, here's where I'm looking in the Koji Build System for the latest xorg-x11-drv-ati:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=95

Right now there's a version 7.1.0-5 in Fedora 19, and a 7.2.0-0 built for the in-the-future Fedora 21.

It might be better to follow the driver upstream:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
and
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/log/

As far as the closed Catalyst driver, keep an eye on this AMD page:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

The stable driver remains version 13.4, released on May 29, 2013. The current 13.8 beta, released on Aug. 19, 2013, works well enough on my system but doesn't support successful suspend/resume, though the previous beta version 13.6 did. I'm hoping for better suspend/resume results in the next release.

What I'm really hoping for is a open-source driver that supports both 3D acceleration and suspend/resume. Maybe it'll happen at some point in the future. That it hasn't happened yet is what is making me rethink AMD in favor of Intel graphics.

(My AMD APU's GPU is part of the Trinity series and is categorized as such in Wikipedia.)

Big-time Ubuntu contributer Benjamin Kerensa blogs on why he's leaving Ubuntu.