I have been very interested in purchasing an HP Compaq nx5000 notebook with Suse Linux HP Edition 9.1 pre-installed. My Dell Inspiron 8200 died 2 days ago and b/c I have to buy a new laptop anyways, I'd like to get one that is Linux compatible from the get-go. In addition I'm not at all happy with Dell for the level of service/support that they have provided as well as I didn't feel that the Inspiron was a quality machine at all....so I didn't even bother calling them... they can kiss my rear-end. Anyways, I had placed an order for an nx5000 with the following specs:

nx5000
Suse Linux HP Edition 9.1
Penitum-M 1.5ghz (400mhz FSB)
512MB 333mhz DDR SDRAM (2x256)
HP W500/Atheros tri-band onboard wireless nic
multi-bay CDROM drive
8-cell battery (as opposed to the 6-cell)
30gb hdd (4200RPM)
15" screen (1024x768 max resolution)
onboard sound/nic/modem
onboard ATI Radeon 9500 graphics

This machine is meant for daily mobile usage of word-processing, email, spreadsheet, etc... (all office applications), as well as development when I'm on the go.

I cancelled the order today because the salesperson seemed to have mixed something up and it just seemed easier and wiser to cancel it and start over again. When I called again I got some different info regarding what will and will-not work with Linux. At first I was told that I could not order wireless networking or the DVDRW drive with Linux. I don't care about the DVDRW... but the wireless is very important. So the salesperson I spoke with transferred me to an engineer. The engineer told me that her records indicated that the Intel wireless is not supported but that my initial assumption that the Atheros card would work seemed to be on target. However what worried me was that she could not find a driver for the Atheros card anywhere in her system. So she was going to find out for sure and give me a call. In the meantime I tried to do a little searching myself. What I'm interested in is whether there is a driver somewhere for the Atheros card that I could use with other Linux distros... while I will happily use Suse linux, I've been using it on another computer lately and like it quite a bit, I would prefer to have an option of using other distros with the same functionality that I'd get from the nx5000 with Suse.

That's why I'm posting here. I'm trying to find out if anybody else knows anything about this system. First of all, I'd love to find out about the wireless issue. In general I'd love to know about what success people are having with this model notebook with other Linux distros..... also I would love to hear what people have to say about the nx5000 in general. Is it a quality notebook. If I place another order for it, I was definately going to get the 3-year on-site (next-business-day) warranty with accidental damage protection.

So is it good/bad... worth it? Please let me know. I have to make a final decision soon but I don't want to make the wrong decision. I was planning to call again on Tuesday to place an order if all is well...

Thanks for any help/advice anybody can offer.

If I remember right all of the linux models should ship with the atheros card. I've got one of these and it works fine.

Oh yea... This notebook rocks. The only drawback is there is no driver for the sd card reader.

hi at all,

i also bougth the nx5000 and run it with debian. everything runs fine. but i have some problems with the sound buttons +/-/mute at the front. do you know how to get them run?

well, it's me again. i found a way to get it work. i pressed the buttons on the shell to got the key- and scancodes. then i used a xmodmap to define the following:
xmodmap -e "keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute"
xmodmap -e "keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume"
xmodmap -e "keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume"

...so far so good.... i also can put these commands into the terminal and the buttons run in X! (if not use the KHotKeys to link the keys to the functions of the Kmix)

I was just pricing the nx5000 today for a friend of mine who is getting a new laptop and he wants it to run linux - chalk up one more convert!

his needs are basic word processing (he writes a lot for pleasure and business), dvd watching (no tv otherwise), wireless networking is also a requirement since he has no internet connection other than walking up to the local coffee shop.

I saw the nx5000 has 3 choices for wireless networking - 2 of them are integrated Intel Pro wireless that are not compatible w/ Linux and the third one is the integrated HP W500 802.11 a/b/g which is Linux compatible according to the website.

here's a link:

http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/cto...x5000_notebook

go to that link and notice that the rightmost column is for the notebook with Suse 9.1 installed. Click 'Customize' and then notice that under the wireless category there are no options other than the HP W500. I also read an article/review on the nx5000 with Linux and it said the same thing (although i can't find a link to that now).

Can anyone else confirm or deny this from first hand experience?

To me this seems like a nice laptop - and good for newbies that are willing to learn. And you have to love the $139 discount over the basic package by choosing Suse 9.1 instead of Windows XP with Office. three cheers for HP - HP HP hooray

the compaq nx5000 comes with a suse linux made by hp. so everything will work fine with this OS

if you decide to use another distribution... you still have to proof the programming process of the ipw2200 driver at sourceforge.net .

PFunk

You're correct. The box runs SuSE just fine. Levi is right as well.

Hi,

I couldn't wait for the SuSE model to come out, so I bought the XP model and wiped it clean. Then I installed SuSE without any issues.

Unfortunatly I have the built in Intel wireless on the motherboard and I've just fitted my house and my apartment with wireless so I'm slightly miffed that I have to use a cable for the laptop.

Does anyone have a solution to get wireless on the XP intended nx5000 to work on SuSE?

... and yes, I should have been more patient...

prodigy

i found out that intel still working on a driver for the ipw2200 and it looks like they will throw it out during december.

if you are hot and can't wait. take a look here: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
maybe it will help you.

p.s. let me know if you got it run ;-) ... i still work on it too

Have you been able to get the sd card reader to work?

no, cause i don't need it!

Ditto. I don't need it at the moment, but I would like to get it to work.

Hi,

I also have this device, but not the Version that is shipped with SuSE 9.1. At first I installed a SuSE 9.1 and there were just 3 things that did not work: The WLAN, SD Card Reader, and the special keys. Now I have installed a self-built LFS.

The WLAN device is a Intel 2200BG (The Linux-Version has an other device as far as I now) I got WLAN to work with ndiswrapper. But I also tried driverloader and the ipw2200 driver. All three driver work, but none of them perfectly. But for me, ndiswrapper is the best choice, because I need WPA support.

ipw2200 is probably ok for most of the users, but this driver doesn't have WPA support jet. And the WLAN led doesn't work (although the wlan swich makes no problems). I didn't test his driver too much, but in a short test it worked.

ndiswrapper and driverloader require a a 16k stack kernel patch from Linuxant. (see http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FAQ) ndiswrapper caused my system to hang for some seconds after loading the kernel module. After ndiswrapper made a reset of the windows driver (I saw some messages about that in dmesg), the system worked normally and WLAN worked stable. A very recent ndiswrapper from CVS solved this problem for me (ndiswrapper still has to reset the driver immediately after loading the module, but this doesn't cause the whole system to hang. So this is not a problem any more, you will only mention that the WLAN led turns off and on). Driverloader didn't work stable for me.

The SD reader seems to be unsupported. At least the wbs driver from http://projects.drzeus.cx/wbsd/ doesn't work. I found out that the notebook uses some Texas Instrument sd card drive.

I haven't tried to set up all the function keys yet, but I don't think these make any problems. Other things I haven't testet: software suspend, IrDA, tv out, modem, pcmcia and firewire. But there seem to be drivers/solutions for all of these components.

After some further thesting, I'm gong to write a report about my testing results for tuxmobile.org.

Ok, I've got the relevant driver sources at last but unfortunately when trying to build the IPW2200 drivers I'm getting a path / file does not exist error. The file it is looking for is a 'build' shortcut in a directory in /lib/modules/2.6.5-7.111.5-default/. After creating this directory from a copy of /lib/modules/2.6.5-7.111-default/, the make command still failed to work and I determined it must be that the 'build' shortcut does not point to a valid path. How can I compile this and get it working? By the way, when I get 'Accoustic Scanning' activated on the WifiManager, I hear the slow beeping - I'm not sure if this is a good sign. Any help would really be appreciated!

ooops.... propably i'am to late...

hp shipes the nx5000 with diffrent hardware. the suse(hp)model has an hp-wlan-adapter included and the other models comes with an intel ipw2200.
the susemodel runs fine cause there are no probs with hp-wlan... ;-)
the intelmodels was made for the windows platform and had problemes with a software killswitch for the wlanadapter if you running linux.... since the ipw2200 driver (version19-> 12/20/04) everything runs fine!!!

i run the wireless lan with ubuntu linux and it works well!

bye