Any notebook computer these days produces a lot of heat when doing CPU intensive applications. Also they get hotter when doing graphic intense tasks even though they contain a low end graphics model. My Dell Inspiron 1520 that contains a Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 and nVidia GeForce8 8400M GS gets hot when handling Flash content or working barely hard. When it installs programs, it gets over worked and it gets hot. I use Gentoo, so installing requires compiling. The only way to solve heat issues is cleaning out the dust and buy a notebook cooler like Zalman ZM-NC3000. Buying anything else than the Zalman notebook cooler is just a waste of money. For notebook computers, it is best to buy slower processors and graphics, so over heating becomes less of an issue. Also using 7200 RPM hard drives is not a good, so it best to pick a 5400 RPM drives.
Using the ATI or AMD graphics proprietary driver will not help with heat issues that you have. It will only help with supporting most of the features of your video card that the open source lacks at cost of reliability and stability issues. Sure go ahead with the proprietary drivers from AMD graphics, but do not say that I did not warn you about its stability and reliability problems. The open source drivers for AMD graphics is a lot better even though there are some features like 3D not fully support or they mostly work, but best of all at least is reliable and stable.
Linux can over heat a computer if the heat sink is not adequate at full work load. The reason for this is Linux is more efficient than Windows. Usually, computer manufactures put an under size because Windows is not efficient and they know this. They do this to keep the cost down. Over clocking a computer and then using Linux will create a big mess. Linux will over load the heat sink capability of the over clock system and the computer will shut down. The fan speed is controlled mainly by the BIOS, so in some cases you may need to update your BIOS. Other cases your computer is dependent with Windows, so the fan might be turned off when running Linux. This is not flaw of Linux. It is flaw in the computer manufacture design.
OpenSUSE is a pre-compiled distributions that depend on packages. You can download from AMD or add an unsupported server to the package manager that contains package for AMD graphics. The problem with pre-compile distributions is you are at the mercy of how the maintainer for the desire program package it up for your distribution. If you want to learn Linux and use it, pre-compiled distributions will limit your learning experience and limit the usage of Linux because pre-compile distributions do not have a rolling release which means you can upgrade the software forever with out having to do a clean install of the latest distribution.
The "/usr/src/linux-$(uname -r)/Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt" is file located in the kernel source documentation. Pre-compile distributions do not install the source code or headers, so you have to manually install it.
The command sudo gedit modproble.conf will only create a new file name modprobe.conf and what directory location you are in will create that file in only that directory. You have to specify the correct full path to the file like sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.conf. Depending the distribution, it has rules what config to edit for modules or drivers. Sure you can edit that file, but if you distribution uses utilities to create that file, any additions will be erase. In Gentoo, I store all custom module loading and options, /etc/modprobe.d. Also each device is separated by a file for better organizing. When I change any files in that directory, I run update-modules to create a new /etc/modprobe.conf.
I see that you edit your first post to leave out any helpful information to help you. If you do this nobody can help you. Repost the information. We just need the output of lspci -v because it lists the module that is being used for the hardware. Sure the utility lsmod can be used, but only lists what modules or loaded in memory and it can be confusing what modules are actually being used.
