There was a talk somewhere that Ubuntu has broken its hardware detecting routine since 12.04 LTS, to accommodate better with coming UEFI onslaught. Whatever they exactly broke I've no idea and no tools to repair, as BIOS updates for this Presario F700 stopped in 2008. Sure, there are some BIOS mod hacks out there, but they are exclusively meant for more valuable hardware like ThinkPads. HP/Compaq AMD/FY NVIDIA based machines belong to true, genuine, undiluted junk category right from the start.
So with the Ubuntu Studio 13, I lost internal audio/speakers and Ethernet in my F700: these devices were simply sending incoherent answers to new and "improved" Ubuntu hardware probe. The crippled machine was still capable to re-route audio to external Logitech USB speakers, and WiFi connection was just fine, so I stayed with Ubuntu Studio 13.10 for month or so. I was booting several subsequent Ubuntu Studio/Lubuntu 14.04 dailies from live USB sticks in the meantime, sure, only to discover that nothing was done to support old and buggy hardware.
However, once I tried PC Linux OS, and both Ethernet and internals speakers were back ON like nothing happened. But there's a ton of incompatibilities with whatever apps I need for my laptop to function properly, so I dropped that distro in a day.
Here comes LXLE. It's based on [L]ubuntu 12.04, so there are some chances. Internal speakers shows up when that device officially called "FY NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio bla-bla-bla" is not overheated and can be detected as such:
That LXLE distro is quite interesting in itself. First thing I like about it they don't give a damn to all that open-source driver code drivel (read: reverse-engineered hacks) and use closed binaries wherever they can, especially when those hacks ("nouveau", e.g.) just don't work. I salute their acceptance of this approach, I'd also like them to set an alternative font engine (instead of forever lousy freetype), add better fonts, and upgrade everything for this LXLE project to accept MIR/Wayland and maybe Enlightenment 19 goodies nicely. Maybe I will keep this F700 sick computer and not smash it against the wall then.
Later on, I will definitely keep an eye on LXLE 14.04 for whatever machines I would be messing with this April. Lubuntu/Xubuntu 14.04 will be next second and third candidates.
One caveat though. To upgrade closed binaries of FY NVIDIA from version 173 to 304, you have no less than four different ways to do that. Two of them are actually nice, via GUI installers/updaters which look smart, work relatively fast and don't ask stupid questions. The problem is neither of them works, both bring in kernel panic. LXLE project offers alternative, more mature kernels to flash post factum, but who knows how much more havoc these will bring compared to much milder case of crippling video drivers. Nobody reported any improvement yet.
Booting in safe mode followed by an intention to roll-back to the old driver didn't do anything: as it occurred, old driver is perfectly capable to cause the same kernel panic when your crippled F700 tried it once already.
My second attempt of preparing LXLE amd64 live USB stick was more successful in that I passed on an option of having a persistence file, but demanded upgrades during installation, then after installation I started software upgrade manually twice, one upgrade after another, before doing anything else. A second upgrade was apparently really needed because the first one has rendered some more stuff quite obsolete. Like kernel headers maybe.
XBMC works just fine, HD streams have enough options of interleave and other tweaks to guarantee comfort playback (with FY NVIDIA 610M! fo FY sake!), ACE Stream P2P Player, BTlive and Magic Player work fine and putting all those non-torrent streamers to shame.
Internal speakers don't work still, so anyone knows a way to cool down that MCP67 piece of crap with a thin copper heat spreader or something?
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