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Hello and thank you very much for the great work you are doing with Elementary ! :)
I have an old laptop running Freya and want to change it to a new i7-6700HQ + Nvidia GTX 950m, and as far as I've seen, Freya 0.3.2 is still shipped with the 3.16 linux kernel.
Simple question, and I want to keep Freya, will it work with the new Skylake CPU or should I upgrade the kernel manually to 4.4 or 4.5, how will be the support for the Intel HD graphic and the Nvidia card ?
Thanks !
The kernel has been updated since the last available disk image. It is now 3.19.0-56 (after updating the system). I don't know about NVidia drivers since I have an AMD Radeon, but otherwise I have a new i7-6500U machine and it works totally fine with that config. I had a minor problem with the open source xorg drivers for the Radeon card, but that one could be solved by using the proprietary drivers that are included in the repositories. For newer NVidia graphics cards, there is a proprietary driver called "nvidia" which should also be included (you should be able to select it in the additional drivers tab in the update settings).
To test if 3D acceleration works, install mesa utils:
sudo apt-get install mesa-utils
and run
glxinfo | grep rendering
or
glxgears
In the latter case, you should see a window with moving cogs.
I'd say give it a shot :) You can update to a newer kernel afterwards if necessary, and with Ubuntu 16.04 coming soon, there should be a new version of elementary in the not too distant future anyway...
EDIT: The new Ubuntu 14.04 hardware enablement stack including kernel 4.4 is now available in freya 0.3.2 - just run the update manager
I just installed freya on a skylake intel nuc i3. The distro and updated kernel were missing the newest wifi drivers. I then tried several kernels. 4.2.8 is what works now for me. 4.4 and 4.5 caused weird ripping graphic glitches on the desktop. BUT I still had to add i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 to grub to have hardware acceleration. I used the solution from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=intel-skl-prelim-support
To answer your questions: freya will not support skylake out of the box you need to manually update the kernel to 4.4 as alex Luxat said.
graphic cards on laptops are a different piece of cookie :S because when the nvidia card is using optimus technology it will never work out of the box. why because nvidia made it windows only and will not add support in the linux drivers. this technology allows laptop users to either use Intel HD graphics to save battery or use the nvidia card but the video input from the nvidia card is transferd through the intel hd graphics chips. That last part is the hardest part of it. both intel and nvidia need there drivers to be correct and have support. which is not.
some light points on how to use the nvidia chip on your laptop are bumblebee software and optimus software. bumblebee is dead and optimus is still in development but has its bugs. there are some ubuntu 14.04 related tutorials
search in google for nvidia optimus on ubuntu 14.04 (elementary os, freya) or 16.04 (elementary os, loki)
how to install nvidia drivers the right way with optimus.
my advise is wait a little longer for the new elementary release "loki" because this will have a newer kernel. I don't know if it will be 4.4 or higher. atleast the nvidia drivers and optimus in ubuntu 16.04 are better. in performance and power consumtion
