LinuxQuestions.org HCL

gt_swagger · 01-30-2005, 02:24 AM

Everything works great save two issues:

- Until you install the nVidia drivers, on some variants (Mandrake in particular) the display has a 1" black border that isn't used.

- The Broadcom 54g Integrated WiFi chip is TOTAL CRAP. The reception is ghastly. The performance lackluster. Not to mention it has absolutely ZERO Linux support. Not even alpha test drivers. NOTHING. So, if you plan on getting this laptop, plan on getting a USB wifi adapter as well.

linchat · 02-18-2005, 08:40 AM

Alps touchpad needs a great deal of work, installed .14 drivers for the touch pad and took some time to activate. The psmouse driver must be loaded AFTER usb is activated. Very important. Main problem is the mouse is slow, adjustamnts in gnome mouse panel helped but affected the accuracy.

The broadcom wlan device can be used with ndiswrappers. This allows you to install 32 bit windows drivers. Note: This only works in 32 bit version of Linux.

Issues with sound until I installed 2.6 kernel (ALSA)

I have heard there is no support for the media devices.

mrGenixus · 04-04-2005, 12:54 PM

Actually generally linux-compatible. Broadcom Wireless G is a pian, but works. No linux support for card reader. black boprder problem is actually abug in the nvidia drive that can and has been resolved.
This notebook has it's own linux mailing-list that has fixes and howtos for all but the card reader. Everything else seems to work great.

Phathead · 04-11-2005, 01:49 PM

I am very impressed with this laptop. I expected a nightmare, and it took less than a day to set up with 64 bit Linux.

I found these two pages invaluable:
http://www1.uop.edu/~khughes/presario-r3120us/
http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/linux/compaq-r3000/

They are a little outdated, but the information is still good.

I am using the 64 bit proprietary Nvidia driver. It works, but I have to load, unload, and reload with options the nvidia module to get rid of the black bar previously mentioned. 3D performance is acceptable, and the video overlay works. I don't play games in Linux, but I do play DVDs.

The wireless card works perfectly with ndiswrapper. This was actually one of the easier things to setup. I don't understand the complaints about range. It seems to work well even far away. I used the 64 bit version of the driver. Check for working drivers here: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

The touchpad worked for me without drivers, but to get the scrolling to work and to have control over the tapping feature, I had to install drivers found in the first link above.

The powernow feature of the Athlon64 works well with the powernowd daemon. The transition is seemless, and with a 12-cell battery, it will run about 4 hours with light word processing activity.

Power management is the big problem. Suspend to RAM sort of works, but it does not wake up with video, and I cannot make suspend to disk (ie hibernate) work at all. For now, I have to power off when I need to save power and I won't be using it.

The Ethernet port works, but for some reason is detected as eth1, I have no eth0.

I don't know about the card reader, the firewire port, or the PCMCIA port. I have nothing to test these with. Otherwise, everything seems to work very well

06-18-2005, 03:48 PM

Great laptop. All the important features are working. I even found a 64bit windows driver for the wireless-adapter. Works with ndiswrapper. Check: http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/drivers.php

rdwtux · 06-26-2005, 09:16 AM

For those having problems using this laptop w/Linux I would suggest install Ubuntu Hoary. A vanilla install via cd will leave you with a completely useable system from the first boot.

Two issues that need to be addressed after install:

1. Built-in wireless will need ndiswrapper installed as:
"apt-get install ndiswrapper"
then simply download and install the windows driver as:
"ndiswrapper -i bcml5a.inf"

You now have a perfectly working 802.11G wireless card, no fuss.

2. If you are going to use OpenGL 3D rendering, the default nvidia drivers that are installed (nv) are not going to cut it. Simply install the nvidia commercial drivers as:
"apt-get install nvidia nvidia-glx nvidia-settings"

Replace "nv" in your xorg.conf with "nvidia" and make any other modifications you need (see the nvidia docs in /usr/share/doc/nvidia)

That's it! From cd insertion to fully functioning it should be less than an hour (includes a 45 minute cd install)

livewire98801 · 04-06-2006, 05:39 AM

Under Fedora 5, I have been very pleased with this notebook. Battery life seems good, though I haven't taken it off AC much.

It should be noted that I've had this machine for a while, but haven't been able to get Linux working on it until now. I tried FC2, FC3, SuSE 9.1, SuSE 10, Mandrake 10, Ubuntu 5.10, and a few others. The biggest problem was that I couldn't get the PCMCIA adapter to work. There are guides out there to get them to work, but I could never get it to cooperate. Apparently there are memory allocation problems with some of these machines. Since I don't have the internal wireless adapter, this was a requirement. Apparently this has been resolved though, wireless is now working great.

Since I don't have the widescreen model, I've not run into any video problems, though there is an update to the Nvidia drivers that you need to patch the installer with before it will compile a driver:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=62021

I spent quite a while looking for that one :) While I was looking for it, the default 'nv' driver worked just fine, but without hardware acceleration, it choked on GL. This was no suprise.

CPU stepping works well, I'm using a 32-bit processor. Suspend to RAM doesn't work yet, but I haven't played with it either. The NForce modem informs me that it's working with the smartlink driver (slmodem-alsa-2.9.11-1.lvn5), but I don't have a phone line, so I haven't tested it.

This machine uses the Alps touchpad, standard synaptics driver settings issued by Anaconda work very well, once I figured out that gestures are turned on by default. . . couldn't figure out why the hell my browser kept going back.

Sound works fine, autodetected and installed the snd_intel8x0 module. Ethernet also works fine, detects link automaticaly.

All in all, now that I have a distro and kernel that will support the PCMCIA slot, I am very happy with this machine. The addition of NetworkManager is very helpful for wireless on a mobile, once you get working drivers. Fortunatley, I have a card that has native Linux support.

Code:

Athlon XP-M 2800+ (1600mhz)
NForce3 chipset
512mb DDR333
15" TFT
Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go 32M
Alps touchpad
DVD-ROM
40GB 4200RPM HDD

Code:

lwmobile ~]$ sudo lspci -v
00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Host Bridge (rev a4)
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0
        Memory at f0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
        Capabilities: [44] HyperTransport: Slave or Primary Interface
        Capabilities: [c0] AGP version 2.0

00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 LPC Bridge (rev a6)
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0c80
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0

00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce3 SMBus (rev a4)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: 66MHz, fast devsel, IRQ 10
        I/O ports at 2040 [size=64]
        I/O ports at 2000 [size=64]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0c80
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
        Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0c80
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
        Memory at e8001000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:02.2 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 2.0 (rev a2) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0c80
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
        Memory at e8004000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 2

00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
        I/O ports at 1400 [size=256]
        I/O ports at 1c00 [size=128]
        Memory at e8002000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:06.1 Modem: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [Generic])
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
        I/O ports at 1800 [size=256]
        I/O ports at 1c80 [size=128]
        Memory at e8003000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation nForce3 IDE (rev a5) (prog-if 8a [Master SecP PriP])
        Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0c80
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0
        I/O ports at 2080 [size=16]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

00:0a.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 PCI Bridge (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0
        Bus: primary=00, secondary=02, subordinate=02, sec-latency=128
        I/O behind bridge: 00003000-00007fff
        Memory behind bridge: e8100000-e97fffff
        Prefetchable memory behind bridge: 30000000-33ffffff

00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 AGP Bridge (rev a4) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 16
        Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=01, sec-latency=10
        Memory behind bridge: ea000000-eaffffff
        Prefetchable memory behind bridge: f8000000-fc0fffff

00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
        Flags: fast devsel
        Capabilities: [80] HyperTransport: Host or Secondary Interface

00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
        Flags: fast devsel

00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
        Flags: fast devsel

00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
        Flags: fast devsel

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 420 Go 32M] (rev a3) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 248, IRQ 20
        Memory at ea000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at f8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
        Memory at fc000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=512K]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at fc080000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [44] AGP version 2.0

02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
        Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RT8139
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
        I/O ports at 7000 [size=256]
        Memory at e8102000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1620 PC Card Controller (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 16
        Memory at e8100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Bus: primary=02, secondary=03, subordinate=06, sec-latency=176
        Memory window 0: 30000000-31fff000 (prefetchable)
        Memory window 1: e8400000-e87ff000
        I/O window 0: 00003000-000030ff
        I/O window 1: 00003400-000034ff
        16-bit legacy interface ports at 0001

02:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1620 PC Card Controller (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 17
        Memory at e8101000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Bus: primary=02, secondary=07, subordinate=0a, sec-latency=176
        Memory window 0: 32000000-33fff000 (prefetchable)
        Memory window 1: e8c00000-e8fff000
        I/O window 0: 00003800-000038ff
        I/O window 1: 00003c00-00003cff
        16-bit legacy interface ports at 0001

02:04.2 System peripheral: Texas Instruments PCI1620 Firmware Loading Function (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 006d
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64
        I/O ports at 7400 [size=64]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

Crito · 06-06-2006, 07:37 PM

My Compaq R3240US laptop has a buggy triple speed clock. Exact same specs (AMD64 3200+, nForce3, GeForce 440MX 64MB, Broadcom WiFi). No Linux distro works correctly with it and no combination of boot parameters makes any difference. For more info visit: http://www.foo-projects.org/~olivier/r3000/

I'd have to say the hardware is completely incompatible with Linux. 1 out of 10 :o

Adrian Baker · 10-29-2006, 12:25 PM

I absolutely love this laptop! It came with XP but I now dual boot with Suse 10.0 and use Linux for nearly everything.

Mine has the Broadcom wireless card, ATI 9000IGP (RS300) graphics and these both work fine.

To get wireless working I used ndiswrapper with the windows drivers and this works flawlessly. Graphics too are fine, although they were not brilliant until I realised that I had set my screen resolution incorrectly!

The touchpad mouse worked well, but took some time to configure. Once I'd worked out how to do it, I turned off the 'tap for click' feature and had it move at exactly the speed I wanted.

The sound is great too.

Problem areas:

Suse wouldn't boot up when installed. Turning ACPI=off on the boot option solved this one, but... (read on)

I have solved pretty much everything now EXCEPT power management. I can't boot it with ACPI enabled and have no way of suspending to disc or of monitoring the battery. Maybe I need a better distro?? I'm loving Suse though.