My Installation on Compaq Presario V2000 UPDATE    

Two months ago, I had sold my old Compaq Armada, an aging but tireless laptop that did very well with Mandriva. It was time to replace it with a new laptop. At the same time, I wanted a 64-bit computer so I could get my hands into the next generation of PCs. This Compaq Presario fit the bill.

First impressions

Much of what limits my specs is what my budget could afford, but not getting their built-in wireless was on purpose - I needed to ensure what I had for wireless was supported by a Linux driver without going through ndiswrapper. Honestly, there is no big technical reason I have against ndiswrapper except for a few anecdotes from some users that ndiswrapper was not always stable with WPA.

The laptop itself is extremely lightweight, the battery being the heaviest beast. I'm not terribly thrilled with the construction, however, since the case is made from fairly flimsly plastic and flexes too easily. I'm afraid I may pick up the laptop using a corner and break the motherboard inside because it flexes so much.

Beyond that, I do like the layout. There are two USB slots, one on each side. There is an external monitor connection, an S-video connection, the ethernet and modem connections, and a single cardbus slot. The battery fits at the very back of the underside and also serves to prop the laptop at an angle, making it easier to type for me. All connections except power are on the sides or front of the laptop.

Installation and preliminary configuration

The laptop came with Windows XP and I opted to keep a dual boot for now. Now that I have wireless working the way I want it, I may wipe XP. However, keeping XP presented a bit of a problem. First, I had to burn backup disks, about a dozen of them, and this took at least two hours. Since I didn't have a separate XP disk, I tried simply wiping the entire drive, partitioning it by hand, and forcing the restore disks to half the drive. It didn't work - the restoration process re-partitioned the entire drive for XP. Using a Knoppix disk after restoring XP, I resized the NTFS partition to half the drive, made sure it didn't corrupt the XP installation, and started installing Linux.

I had first tried installed Kubuntu 64-bit, but bootup would stall and I couldn't find out why. I'm fairly positive now if I'd passed the correct kernel options at bootup, it'd be fine. However, I moved on to FC5 64-bit since I use Fedora on my home server and am quite familiar with it. Here is the kernel line for Grub:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC5 ro root=LABEL=/ noapic rhgb pci=assign-busses quiet

The FC5 installation went very well, all included hardware was recognized (I purchased the wireless card later), and it booted just fine. After running updates with yum, I added livna and re-ran updates (I'm obsessive about running updates), and then I installed the ATI fglrx driver. The resolution for the widescreen is set at 1280x768 and works very well. There was a kernel update that broke the installation; an early lesson makes me keep the last working kernel, so I took out the offending version using rpm -e. A few days later, an update (2.6.16-1.2111) came out and the update notes explained what had happened, a broken Xen update had "snuck" into the kernel! http://lwn.net/Articles/182652/. After grabbing -2111, I was able to boot with no problem.

I did install libdvdcss and xine to watch DVDs, and I watched a few minutes of "Stomp Out Loud" to make sure it worked. It was great but the gui will take a little getting used to.

The Synaptic touchpad works as it should. Both scroll areas work fine, and I do like using the bottom scroll to navigate backward and forward instead of using ALT-left arrow/right arrow or using the icons in Firefox.

FC5's KDE control center does give options when the laptop lid is closed, such as hibernate, suspend, logout, and poweroff. I did try suspend, but there was no video when FC5 resumed. I've since disabled any action on lid close for now.

Wireless

I wanted a card that was supported by a Linux driver, so I looked for an Atheros chipset card and came across the Netgear WG511T. I had used their WG511 based on the Prism chipset, but that wouldn't work with WPA. Since I live in an apartment complex, I wanted the highest encryption level reasonable and WPA fits the bill. Cards with the Atheros chipset use the Madwifi Linux driver and will associate with WPA in Linux.

Once the card came in, I had expected to simply install madwifi using yum and have the card recognized. However, it didn't happen. At first, I had suspected a bad card or a bad socket. After half a day of googling, I found I needed to pass 'pci=assign-busses' to the kernel from grub. Voila! It worked! After rebooting, I was able to use wpa_supplicant to associate and dhclient to grab the address and routing. I did try using Network Manager, but since I use KDE I couldn't find or start the applet. I've resigned myself to start the wireless via command line, and I have the specific command for WPA and for work tucked away in a text file. Here are some of the specifics.
-the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
 
network={
ssid="_wireless router SSID_"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="_some text phrase_"
proto=WPA
}
-the command to start the WPA on my wireless card:
/usr/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dmadwifi -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -Bw
-Dmadwifi gives the card driver (madwifi).
-iath0 gives the interface for the wireless card (ath0).
-c/etc/... gives the location of the conf file for wpa_supplicant.
-Bw tells wpa_supplicant to work in the background (-B) and to wait until the card is available (-w). Otherwise, wpa_supplicant would exit if the card was not available and you'd have to re-enter the command again.

Once the card's two LEDs began flashing together, indicating the card has associated with my wireless router, I ran dhclient ath0 to grab the address from the router.

Conclusions

Beyond the rather flimsy case, this is an excellent laptop so far. The Turion is very responsive using FC5-64 compared to the 32-bit Windows. The battery lasts for several hours using Linux and the widescreen is very bright and very sharp. Using an X86_64 distribution isn't bad even though repositories are usually a little behind right now, and they don't have as many RPMs as the i386 repositories. All of the necessary applications are there and it makes FC5-64 usable from the first minute.

UPDATE

The fact I am using a 64-bit distribution does bring in a few more issues when trying to play multimedia, specifically flash on the web. Currently, there are no 64-bit versions of the flash player from Macromedia, so I searched for open-source versions. Gnash appears to be the answer, but I have yet to find the file that supplies the required includes to compile Gnash. Until then, I'm going to search for an rpm somewhere on the net.

UPDATE #2

I recently found a short-term answer for using 32-bit Firefox plugins for the 64-bit installation. Several how-to's showed uninstalling the 64-bit version and installing the 32-bit version of Firefox, but it never seemed to work for me. Instead, I am now using nspluginwrapper ( http://freshmeat.net/projects/nspluginwrapper/).

For the flash plugin, I un-compressed the download and found the .so file. Using the .so plugin, I ran the "nspluginwrapper -i /path/to/plugin.so" command and restarted Firefox. To be sure, I typed in "about:plugins" on the address bar and it showed flash and nspluginwrapper successfully installed.

Playback is not consistent and it will lock up Firefox on occassion. However, when it works, it seems to have a better sync between video and audio than running in a 32-bit environment. Since the current flash player for Linux isn't equal to the Windows version (as of 8/7/06), some websites such as youtube may not work. Go over to http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ for information from an Adobe employee's blog concerning the Linux flash player development.

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