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by a former member

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My HPdv9225 is having problems again. After the last factory repair on 11/15/2007 Hewlett-Packard down graded the motherboard from a Quanta 3EB6 to a Quanta 30B6 without notifying me (from an HP DV9225US to a Compaq V6133CL). I discovered this when I went to reinstall linux on the machine. Also, after this 'down grade' every time I put an HD in the second bay, it was destroyed (WD has replaced three under warranty because the controllers were destroyed). I got ahold of an HP case manager and as a result they are replacing the entire computer with a new one, a DV9700z with the NVidea 8400 GS discrete graphics and an 801.11 b/g/n.

HP being HP, they cannot tell me what the chipsets are; they claim this is because the machines are too configurable (BS! 4 CPU's, 3 displays, 2 possible wireless solutions, single ethernet solution on the same MB, which HP will not provide in advance).

So, having layed the background, I would like to know what experience any of you might have had installing Linux on the DV9700Z. If you might know what drivers I might need in advance. I generally use OpenSuse (in this case 10.3) When all is said and done, I will be virtualizing XP on top of this and also using it to test Vista SP1.

Can anyone provide any information?

7 replies

by Former member

Clarifications

by deecodeuh

Well, I just recently bout a DV9700Z laptop from HP, and I've been going through some decently sized troubles. I have been having a terrible time trying to get the wireless to work, the manufacturer is Atheros, and supposedly MadWifi is supposed to be the only driver I'll ever need to get that card working. Not true! I have been in, around, trough, and under madwifi for a solution and have yet to get one. I'm almost willing to say that ndiswrapper is your best bet. Try to ndiswrap this driver: http://www.mediafire.com/?cfdzj3eaizt

I'm not discouraging you from trying to use the madwifi.org drivers, but I've had no luck with them.

I don't know what you do to get the NVidia drivers in Suse, but I just install the official NVidia drivers with my package manager.

All you need are the wireless, and Nvidia drivers for linux. Everything else works on default.

I use Arch Linux, (very pleased with the distro) and it has suited to my needs very nicely with this laptop.

The laptop has an NVidia chipset (630m), here's a nice thread for putting XP on this beast: http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1202003563807+28353475&threadId=1197242 Follow that, and you'll have a good amount of devices working.

You can get the Vista drivers straight from hp.com.

by Former member

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by Former member

Can you try a USB boot of Backtrack 3 and see if your wireless will work? The reason I ask is because BT3 has the best auto hardware detect I have ever seen in a Linux distro. If the wireless works with BT3 then it is a configuration problem rather than a hardware problem.

For the Nvidia drivers, I usually go to their web site and download the compiler and compile the driver as needed. On the other hand, once I get the kernel stable, I recompile it to what I need so I have to compile many of the drivers.

by deecodeuh

Hm, I've never tried Backtrack 3. I'll look it up. I searched over the weekend to get my wireless working and found an xp driver that works under ndiswrapper. (It's different than the one I sent you before.) I can send you the link after I get home.
True, I would much rather have open source drivers on my machine. Maybe I threw in the towel too early on MadWifi.org.

The NVidia drivers from the site work well. (You probably knew that)

I can tell that I'm not nearly as advanced at linux as you are. I've only been on linux for six months now.

by Former member

There are two ways to approach wireless. One of those is with Ndiswrapper. However, as you noticed, not all XP wireless drivers will work.

The other way, if you have a 2.6+ kernel is to use bcm43xx-fwcutter. To use BCM43xx do an internet search for wl_apasta.o, which is the kernel of the windows XP Broadcom wireless driver.

The speeds are different; Ndiswrapper will give you the full 802.11 g speed of 54MBit/sec, where as with BCM43xx will only (per the information available) give you a speed of 11 MBits/sec (802.11 b). On a 10 Mbit network you will see no difference in delivery, on a 100 Mbit network, neither is really fast enough. If you just use wireles to surf, then you wont notice the difference because you are limited to 7, 3, 1.5 MBits/sec for DSL.

On BT3, I advise against using it as an everyday install of Linux. BT3 is not intended for that. BT3 is intended for hardware testing, penetration testing, and forensics.

by Former member

I still don't know the mother board. The machine has a Broadcom 4328 a/b/g/n wireless. To properly use this wireless you have to get the drivers from Dells website because the HP drivers will not work. Presently, I am using ndiswrapper; later I will try to use the micro code with bcm43xx-fwcutter.

Installation issues:
All: disable the floppy boot in bios.

OpenSuSE:
does not configure the screen bright/dim, DVD, nor Quickplay buttons. Everything else is configurable or configured. Webcam would not work and I could find no meathod to install v4l2 which the cam requires.

Ubunto:
does not configure Quickplay button. Some hassle getting the remote to work, even after installing Lirc. With the Nvidia 8400m graphics I am having trouble getting a splash screen. Hassles installing software such as current versions of Netbeans (6.0, 6.0.1) Sun Java 1.6 update 4 & JDK. Had to use Automatix to fully install multi-media because Ubunto Repositories do not list many packages.

Red Hat/Fedora:
Onlu used live CD. Everthing except QuickPlay button seemed to work. Did not test many functions because of live CD issues.

BackTrack 3:
Everthing seemed to work except multi-function buttons. But BT3 is not intended to be used as a primary OS.

Other:
VMWare seemed clunky but ran XP much faster than it would natively. Could not istall HP drivers in XP because of bios checks. OS X jas 10.4.8 installed well but was slow.

OS X:
Can be installed on this machine natively if one starts with the JAS 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 (Tiger editions) and can be upgraded to Leopard 10.5.1 if one uses the Kalliway edition. Would have much trouble with drivers.

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