Code|Beta

Recently I bought a new laptop, some people might think that this wasn’t the best choice for a laptop, but I’m really happy with it.
So after doing some research, mostly on what hardware it has, I knew the specs but needed a little more detail, I set out to the task of installing Linux on that notebook, I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to do, but I really want Linux on that machine, so here goes

The specs of the machine, well I won’t go into very much detail because if you wanted to know more about this you can go to the HP website and take a look there. The machine has an AMD Turion 64 2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB harddrive (which by the way apparently is an IDE hard drive), RealTek ethernet card, Broadcom BCM4318 wireless card and DVD burner.

OK, now there is one device that doesn’t work at all, that is the memory card reader, this doesn’t bother me all that much at this point. Why it doesn’t work? I don’t know, but at least that’s whats mentioned in other sites that talk of similar models. I will test this and see what happens. The video card, which is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, is also giving me problems, when I try to use the ATI drivers and start X it just locks up, after a couple of seconds of X running I see that the hard drive LED goes on and doesn’t turn off, so I’m guessing that it begins to work on the SWAP partition.

Now, the installation of the system went very smoothly, for this time I used ArchLinux 0.7.2 as the distro. The hard drive is 80GB so there isn’t much space to do much, therfore I’m only creating the SWAP and / partitions, I’m leaving around 40GBs of unpartioned space to install Windows again, what can I say, Windows is needed to run all the tools used at my University.

I ran into a couple of problems on this installation, besides the video card. The / partition is working, but if the check disk is ran it fails, I don’t know exactly what’s causing this to occur, but in order to get the system to boot I had to modify the /etc/fstab file. On the line where the settings for the / partition is I had to change the last option, the pass option, from a 1 to a 0. Now the system boots.

The NICs get changed between eth0 and eth1 on every boot, so sometimes the wireless is located on eth0 and the wired is on eth1 or it can be the other way around. With the latest kernel the wireless card gets detected, I still have to find out how to turn the wireless on and get it to connect to the access point I have.

Arch is basically working, I can log in run X, using the vesa drivers, and I’m able to connect to the network using the wired connection. I’m going to install Fedora on it see if it detects stuff better than Arch.

-LMurillo