DV5Z and Linux

Anyone try to install a Linux disto on their DV5Z yet? I just got mine and Vista really blows, so Im trying to weigh my options. Free Linux, more RAM, or return :/

 

When I get my dv5t (next week) I will be putting either Ubuntu or FC9 (64 bit) on it. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Moved to the Linux forum where I think you'll get a bit more love.

 

I dont see why linux should be a problem.
Unless of course your thinking new platform, new card, etc?

 

You'll be fine. The one thing you might have to manually get working in Linux is the Broadcom wireless card, which is still very easy to do.

 

Actually no, the current cards broke the kernel drive completely I think.
I would wait a few months(2-3).
Although Kernel 2.6.25, which most distros don't have yet, *might* have fixed it.

 

I have a dv5z and I'm running Kubuntu. I have only had problems with the wireless card, but I got that working after a while. I say try it and see how well you like it

 

You did? Cool, I'm looking into the dv5z, care to share your secrets?
So, did the firmware cutter work?

 

I don't quite know what worked how and when, but I followed all of the instructions in my old crying for help thread and it works fine now
Thanks again for the help back then!

 

I beg to differ... Linux has poor support for Broadcom chips because Broadcom won't disclose chip specifications. As a result, drivers are not only minimal and hit-or-miss, they also yield poor performance and poor signal quality.

 

Does that make it hard? no, that was just off topic, Bog.
Even though not *magical*, the Broadcom drivers work really nicely, signal quality is the same as in Windows, as is speed.
It's actually better sometimes.

 

For novice Linux users, yes, it is hard. The drivers suck; they don't even work some of the time, including on my Broadcom card. Many of the threads at the Ubuntu forums also state that the wireless cuts out, and that the bandwidth is limited to 11Mbps. You're misrepresenting reality, to be honest.

 

Funny, I get full bandwith, and it allways works.
(and installing an application isn't that hard)

 

I understand what Bog is saying. There may be some Broadcom chipsets that work nicely with the reverse-engineered kernel modules, but mine was not one of them. The bcm43/xx module simply refused to work. The only way I got it to work was with the win32 driver and ndiswrapper, which I had to compile myself. For a newbie with only one day's experience with Linux, I can tell you it was VERY intimidating.

I've never had problems with it though. Works just as well as it did with WinXP.

 

I got the a/b/g/n wifi card in my dv5z, supposedly it's an Atheros AR5009. None of the existing Linux drivers claimed to support this model number, but looking at the PCI ID from lspci, I figured out that it's supported by the ath9k driver. Unfortunately that driver is still quite new, and isn't in any released Linux kernels yet. According to the ath9k code, this chip (PCI ID 0x002a) is an AR9280.

It took a little bit of hacking, but I got it working on my dv5z now.

I started by installing Ubuntu 8.04, then I downloaded the source for the 2.6.26.3 kernel and built that. Then I grabbed the source for the wireless-testing code and the compat code from here http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

The ath9k driver hasn't been included in the compat stuff yet, so it's not a slam dunk to install it...

 

As a note, my broadcom card works fabulously in ubuntu, with one qualification. It somehow deactivates itself from time to time. It's as if Linux turns it off at the level of the bios. I'm not sure why this is but a few others have noticed the same thing. Consequently, I have to boot into my xp partition, trip the hotkey to enable the card and then it works fine for a month or so.

 

For some reason the powernow-k8 driver isn't being loaded automatically at bootup, so I have to manually load it to enable power saving control. Strange.

I also need to go chase down the softmodem support for the 56k modem. Will be traveling to some rural areas with no high speed networking...

 

I got Ubuntu installed on my dv5z and I must say that it is very cool. Funny how this open source stuff kicks Redmond's ***! My only complaint is that I do not have suspend/sleep or hibernate. Has anyone gotten those features to work?

 

Hibernate works for me, but sleep doesn't. I.e., it goes to sleep but hangs on wakeup. Also hibernate isn't perfect, the video color palette is corrupted on wakeup so screen colors all look funny.

 

I was thinking of installing ubuntu on my laptop. I've got a pretty much novice experience with linux. Used Suse and Madriva before, but I wouldn't know how to get around complicated problems at all. Does anyone think it's a good idea to install Ubuntu? I noticed there was are problems with keeping a connection running.

 

That's because open source is 'open' anybody can contribute to the code and improve it, rather than the few people in Redmond. So it improves faster, and bugs are fixed faster. The people are just more dedicated.

You need swap to be at least the same size as your RAM. i.e, if your RAM is 1Gb, your swap must be 1Gb.

It is a very good idea to start with Ubuntu. That's how I came along. Fedora is a good alternative as well. Simply, you want to start with a distro that is popular, and has a very big online community. This way, if you have a problem, their forums can help you more and google-ing gives plenty of effective results.