Linux on the HP Pavilion zv5405

Recently, I helped a friend buy a laptop, with which we did a clean reinstall of Windows XP, followed by an install of slackware linux. I will explain the steps I took to get linux to work.

The laptop is a Hewlett Packard zv5405us, purchased April 7 from a Best Buy in Houston, TX. It has an AMD Athlon64 3200+ (2.0Ghz) processor, 80GB hard drive, 512mb ram, and a widescreen display. A more detailed list of hardware, along with what has been tested is below:

Repartitioning

The first step was to repartition the hard drive and do a clean reinstall of windows. You can completely skip windows reinstallation if you are so inclined (note: highly recommend!). For our partitioning scheme, the new partitions included space for windows, root and home partitions for linux (you can combine these if you want, but it makes reinstalling distros harder), a couple of GB of swap space, and a few GB of fat32 for a common storage area that both OS's could fully access.

If you prefer to keep whatever preinstalled software came with the laptop, I suggest using a Knoppix LiveCD to shrink the existing partition with the included qtparted utility.

Reinstall XP

If you choose to install XP, you should do it before you install linux. Just boot from whatever media you have, and do a clean install. Don't forget service packs and dozens and dozens of Security Updates, each of which seem to require a reboot.

After installing XP, there were some problems. The latest drivers on the HP web site weren't sufficient, but we found most of the necessary stuff on the included driver dvd. We also found that the cpu seemed to be stuck at 800MHz. We ultimately solved that issue by installing the latest processor driver from AMD then using the SpeedSwitchXP utility to change the settings.

Install Slackware

After dealing with windows, we began the Slackware 10.1 install process. After formatting the drives, I did a full install of everything except gnome (which is no longer officially part of Slackware). The install went by painlessly and we rebooted to command prompt. Then, I installed swaret, upgraded to all of the latest packages, installed the 2.6.11 kernel from testing/ (and added it to lilo), and installed the latest nvidia graphics drivers (at the time 1.0-7174).

Getting X11 and the wireless to run were the biggest hassles, and I will detail the process below

Setting up X11

The nvidia driver install went by easily, but I found that when X11 ran, it wouldn't go into 1280x800 mode resolution. Instead, I'd get 1024x768 in one corner of the screen, and the last line of pixels on each side "stretching" across the remaining edge. This looked really ugly, and also didn't occur with the included "nv" driver, which is unfortunately non-accelerated. As far as I can tell, the problem was the monitor sending information about it's capabilities to the nvidia drivers, which wasn't dealing with it properly. Ultimately, this was fixed by adding to /etc/X11/xorg.conf Option "NoDDC" "true" in the "Device" section, and the following modeline in the monitor section: ModeLine "1280x800" 83.5 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828

Here is a listing of the entire xorg.conf file

This appears to work fine with the accelerated, binary nvidia drivers.

Setting up the Wireless (802.11g) card

The laptop comes with a built-in Broadcom BCM94306 wireless chipset, which is unfortunately only supported by windows binary drivers. Fortunately, they appear to work fine using ndiswrapper and these drivers: SP23107A. Follow the directions found at the installation wiki, using the "bcmwl5a.inf" file found in the above tarball, and you should get a working wlan0 wireless interface. Use iwconfig to change settings, and dhcpcd wlan0 to just automatically assign an IP from a nearby access point. If you want, add "modprobe ndiswrapper" to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to automatically load the driver on reboot.

Miscellaneous

Here is the output from lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Host Bridge (rev a4)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 LPC Bridge (rev a6)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce3 SMBus (rev a4)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5)
00:02.2 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 2.0 (rev a2)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2)
00:06.1 Modem: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00d9 (rev a2)
00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation nForce3 IDE (rev a5)
00:0a.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 AGP Bridge (rev a4)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 440 Go 64M] (rev a3)
02:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (rev 03)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device ac54 (rev 01)
02:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device ac54 (rev 01)
02:04.2 System peripheral: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8201 (rev 01)

00:00.0 Class 0600: 10de:00d1 (rev a4)
00:01.0 Class 0601: 10de:00d0 (rev a6)
00:01.1 Class 0c05: 10de:00d4 (rev a4)
00:02.0 Class 0c03: 10de:00d7 (rev a5)
00:02.1 Class 0c03: 10de:00d7 (rev a5)
00:02.2 Class 0c03: 10de:00d8 (rev a2)
00:06.0 Class 0401: 10de:00da (rev a2)
00:06.1 Class 0703: 10de:00d9 (rev a2)
00:08.0 Class 0101: 10de:00d5 (rev a5)
00:0a.0 Class 0604: 10de:00dd (rev a2)
00:0b.0 Class 0604: 10de:00d2 (rev a4)
00:18.0 Class 0600: 1022:1100
00:18.1 Class 0600: 1022:1101
00:18.2 Class 0600: 1022:1102
00:18.3 Class 0600: 1022:1103
01:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:0179 (rev a3)
02:00.0 Class 0c00: 104c:8026
02:01.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8139 (rev 10)
02:02.0 Class 0280: 14e4:4320 (rev 03)
02:04.0 Class 0607: 104c:ac54 (rev 01)
02:04.1 Class 0607: 104c:ac54 (rev 01)
02:04.2 Class 0880: 104c:8201 (rev 01)

Todo

I still haven't had a chance to explore all various hardware features. Among these are:

• software suspend/standby
• special touchpad features (eg. scroll wheel)
• quick-launch buttons
• media card reader
• cd-burner
• 64-bit support

Download

Here are some useful files if you are feeling lazy.

• ndiswrapper slackpackage - use installpkg, then follow the directions listed in the wireless config section above.
• a working xorg.conf file
• win32 wireless drivers

If you have any comments or additions, I'd appreciate an email at <contact@mydomain> (change "mydomain" to "mdek.net"). If you would like me to add information, please be as detailed as possible in your email.