Linux Laptop Installation: HP Pavilion ze4900
Hardware
- CPU: Intel Celeron 1.30GHz (i686)
- RAM: 512Mb
- HD: 40Gb
- CD-RW/DVD-R: Philips CDD 5263
- PCMCIA: Texas Intruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller
I initially had problems with the display which I discovered are common with this model laptop. The colours weren't right and would frequently render in a streaky or blocky manner. Physically moving the display back or forward sometimes helped temporarily, sometimes not. I took it back to the dealer who informed me that this model has a common problem with the plug into the display coming loose ... some good sticky tape solved the problem. This problem is common enough for HP to have a dedicated but largely useless web page on their website covering it ... their solution is just to direct you to their Indian call centre. The call centre people (who seemingly know nothing about computers and read it all from a script) then do their best to direct you to your nearest HP dealer, but have no idea about local geographical realities either.
Software
- Distribution: Fedora Core 3
- Kernel: 2.6.9-1.667
Fedora doesn't include my favourite mail reader pine, so I collected that and a few other email-related packages from Dag Wieers' excellent RPM site and elsewhere. See the accompanying email howto for how I set up postfix + procmail + spamassassin + clamassassin, and some notes on using fetchmail and pine.
Installation
Fedora 3 installed without any problems. I installed the system onto one big partition (about 39.5 Gb) with a 500 Mb swap partition. I installed only the Gnome desktop, no KDE or XFCE.
Configuration
Power Management
Power management had me confused for a while, apmd was installed and configured to run but wouldn't start. I later realised that acpi was doing power management anyway so gave up trying to get apmd running. Gnome's power/battery indicator worked fine once I discovered how to install it onto the lower panel ... right click on the lower panel, select Add To Panel, then select Battery Charge Monitor. It doesn't pick up a change from mains to battery (or vice vesa) without logging off and on again, but at least it doesn't require a reboot. I am getting about an hours runtime on the battery. A reasonable amount of useful runtime information about power and related matters is available in the /proc/acpi directories (just 'cat' the files in a terminal):
- /proc/acpi/ac_adapter
- /proc/acpi/battery
- /proc/acpi/thermal_zone
For example, running cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature in a terminal tells me that this laptop generally runs at around 60 degrees (centrigrade). There are no problems with the system fan kicking in when things get too warm.
Display
After installation, the only resolution options available in the GUI config tool (System Settings->Display->Settings) were 640x480 and 800x600, but I wanted 1024x768. First I tried manually adding 1024x768 to /etc/X11/xorg.cfg, but no difference. Then I went back into the GUI tool and selected the Hardware tab. Here, I selected Generic LCD Display->LCD Panel 1024x768 and bingo it worked.
Removable Media
Removable media such as USB drives and the CD-RW/DVD-R have all worked OK so far. I mainly use USB devices for backup now, including both a 160Gb external hard drive and USB memory sticks of various sizes.
One annoying thing about a standard Fedora 3 installation is that, while removable media such as a CD is recognised and automatically mounted upon insertion, the user has to become root to unmount and eject the CD. This is annoying but easily fixed: the solution is simply to add the user to the 'disk' group. This can be done using either standard Linux system administration tools or Fedora's Users and Groups GUI tool. While fiddling with udev configuration files is not necessary, udev is involved here because permissions to devices such as CD and DVD drives under udev are set in /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-udev.permissions.
If you want USB devices to automatically mount and a desktop icon to appear for the device, don't be too zealous when turning off unnecessary services to optimise your system. Make sure you leave the haldaemon running, and probably autofs too.
Ethernet
No problem here, everything worked out of the box.
Sound
Initially, sound was not working. Sound now works for both CDs and streaming web radio: I'm not sure what changed.
Internal Modem
The biggest challenge was getting the internal modem to work, but in the end the difficulty was all of my own making. I initially got sidetracked trying to use the SmartLink slmodem driver, which I eventually discovered was never going to work. Thanks to MarvS and the team at linmodems.org, I learnt that this laptop in fact has a winmodem using the Conexant CXT codec, so the hsfmodem driver is the way to go. I downloaded and installed the free version of the hsfmodem driver from Linuxant to check that it would work, which it did immediately. The free version is limited to 14K, so I upgraded to the full 56K version for around AUD$20 (US$14.95). Well worth it in my opinion, I can earn that amount in half an hour, and no headaches! The upgrade simply involves getting a license key, you don't need to reinstall any software. I'd hate to have to pay for every piece of software on Linux, but in this case convenience wins.