Fedora 7 and Vista on HP dv6409wm

Greetings all.

I am having some troubles with getting my new HP Pavilion dv6409wm to dual boot Fedora 7 with the pre-installed Vista. Fedora 7 is the OS used at my engineering school and I purchased the notebook with the intention of dual-booting the system.

I do not need a whole lot of hard drive space for both systems, as I have another notebook for storage, as well as an external hard drive. Still, I changed the resized the partitions on the 120 GB hard drive. One partition (about 6.5 GB) is set aside as HP Restore data. The rest was for Vista. I took 40 GB out of this Vista partition to install Linux on.

I downloaded the DVD .iso for Fedora and burned it to DVD. The DVD tested just fine, and installed just fine. After the installation it ejects the disk and asks to restart the computer. After the restart, and entering into Fedora, it asks a few more setup questions such as user and password, firewall enable/disable, etc. At the end of this, after clicking finish, the GNOME (or KDE) environment should begin loading, but instead all I get is blank black screen. I've reinstalled Fedora at least a half dozen times today with different settings and each time the exact same result.

So is this common, some major step that I am missing, or simply something I can't do on this computer with this hardware? (I have another person in my class with an HP dv9000 with dual-boot, so I don't believe it is computer hardware related really...) Thank you all for your time and help!

 

http://forum.parallels.com/thread13775.html

Another user on another forum seems to have had the same problem as you. Try out the solution there.

 

Thank you so much for the quick reply and help! I did some more experimenting on my system tonight, tried to reinstall a couple more times, and finally got it to work. The only thing that I changed that made it finally work (perhaps) was to allow my hardware configuration to be sent for information or whatever. After I accepted that, things began to work!

Just a few last things to get figured out, but most of those will come with learning how to use Linux more, since I am a very new user! Thank you again!

 

No problem, bud. Linux is always more hands-on than Windows; that's why there is always tons of help available on-line. Enjoy your new system.

 

It has been quite hands-on already, just getting everything set up!

Well, I have fortunately overcome the problem of the booting KDE to actually open into an X Window environment, but I'm having to do several things to make it work. First off, I have to have the Fedora 7 installation DVD in the drive or it just won't load much past loading the Red Hat kernel. Also, I have to enter the setup with the "interactive" option, physically typing "y" to turn on all these packages or processes for startup. If you don't do the timing right, either, then the same problem I had still occurs and I just get the black screen. Very ackward!

Well, my next challenge though has arrived, and that is configuring my wireless card. This HP dv6409wm came with built in wireless card, and works fine in Windows, but is not even recognized as a networking device in Fedora. In the Networking Properties all I get is the physical ethernet port. I can, however, choose to add new hardware if I have the information for it.

So, while I have a Broadcom 802.11 b/g WLAN card in the notebook, the only adapter available to select that is Broadcom brand is not correct and won't work. I get an error that the module was not detected. In fact, with almost every adapter listed I get an error that the correct module was not detected.

Any ideas? Has someone had similar problems with their internal wireless card, and how was it remedied? I'm dreading that I have to somehow find the correct file or package or something with the correct adapter, figure out where to put it in the Linux file directory, and how, and then go about trying to find the adapter to select in the list to add to new hardware!

 

Broadcom is very much unsupported under Linux, unfortunately, and it's pretty much because Broadcom refuses to release any kinds of specs on it's cards. What you basically have to do is either use ndiswrapper and use the Windows drivers to run the card (fairly easy), or use an extraction program to pull the firmware out of your Windows drivers so that it can be run "natively" by Linux, which is a little more complicated, but theoretically works a bit better with Linux tools like network-manager. If you use "lspci" from a command line and figure out what your actual Broadcom chipset is, you should search for that + linux on Google, and get some more info.

 

Thank you so much Pitabred for your help! I was afraid this was kind of what the story would be like. Do you have any resources that explain how to do either of these processes so that I can have a look at what I need to do?

On a side note, I just learned what Beryl and other such graphics accelerators could do, and WOW, I would love to put that on my Clevo D900k here. Unfortunately I think it's still a bit over my head to figure out getting all set up!