Problems to get HP 8760w and OpenSuSE 12.1, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora16, and Knoppix 6.7.x to run

[Gotare]

Hi,

As a new owner of an HP 8760W (16GB, 2x750GB, 1920x1080, 2430+ HSPA) I was kind of happy. I upgraded all softwares (including BIOS to version F.23) to the latest and greatest, just to secure that all parts where ready for the transformation from Windows7 to Linux (OpenSuSE 12.1).

I was kind of surprised when I discovered that the BIOS have introduced a very big SHOWSTOPPER for installing any Linux on this machine. It seems that all distros have an issue with i2c in this machine after the BIOS upgrade. I thought it would be something wrong with OpenSuSE 12.1, but I was even more afraid when I discovered that all major distros have the same issue, including and distro built on kernels 2.6.xx and 3.0.x.

I would expect that there must be a way of downgrading BIOS to an earlier version, or that HP software development can issue a new BIOS upgrade that revokes this BIG issue.

We are a number of users in the world that runs Linux on our workstations to be able to pull as much power as we can from the Hardware, and it should be a shame if HP can't supply a BIOS that doesn't break the "def standard". Even Knoppix went in to a looked stage running the live-CD (And Knoppix is normally extremely hard to lock on startup)!

Best regards, and hope for a swift answer

Christian Gotare