I've got a new HP Pavilion zv6005US and it came with Windows XP home (blah... I'm a fan of XP pro myself).

So of course my first instinct is to dual boot linux and XP home. I'm only interested in free versions, as I spent the last of my geek fund on the laptop itself. Are there any distros that are specifically good with HP laptops with AMD Athlon 64 chips?

Its also got an ATI pci express card, which I'm slightly worried about since I've only used nVidia up until now.

I'm also worried about Wireless G since my desktop's PCI card still won't work under slackware. (I'm a linux newbie, so I'm assuming its my fault... I'm just hoping there's a magical "HP-wirelessG-64 bit linux" with a fool-proof install.)

Tips or suggestions? (I've been looking around at linux-laptop.net but haven't found anything in the zv6000 series. I'm hoping to add mine soon.)

I'm downloading ubuntu now, so we'll see what it detects natively on the live CD, but I'd rather have tips first before installing to my hard drive.

A quick use of the SEARCH function on these forums will turn up a few hundred threads on this exactl same question.

My suggestion is to use Suse since I've got Suse 9.2 w/ KDE 3.4 running on HP ZE5470 P4 w/ 54g wireless. I spent $20 on Linuxant but you can use other things to get the wireless going. $20 was the easy way.
As for fool proof, it is for the most part. It does have 64bit support. x86_64 is what you look for.

Sorry, I've installed linux on "similar" computers to what others have before, and with any OS, esp. linux, similar just isn't good enough.

After searching all forums under linuxquestions.org for zv6000 and zv6005US I found 2. (the other didn't have what I was looking for.)

Thanks for the helpful post though.

Hi, I have a compaq R4025CA which is aparrently the same as the zv6000 series.
So far, i've had 2 major problems, 1 minor problem which has been fixed. I'm running Fedora Core (which is my favorite distro) FC4test2 and everything works great except: - the Ati Radeon xpress 200m has no drivers YET... and i'm getting a bit impatient (so the graphics aren't very good... no wide screen, low res, etc.)
- wireless doesnt work, and aparrently there's no drivers for the broadcom wireless cards. (yet?)

that's all i got to say, otherwise, it is a really cool laptop jam packed with lots of features. 2.0ghz, 80gb, 1gb, 128MB, DVD+-RW, etc for under $1800 CAD

Well, I've gotten the widescreen to work under ubuntu, but it freezes up at the gnome splash screen. I haven't heard of anyone getting this particular broadcom wireless working, but I'm hoping they release some linux drivers soon.

Thanks for the tips though.

I heard the ATi Radeon Xpress 200 M works under Ubuntu under the r128 driver. Do you have any tips or anyway of getting that driver? I'm running Fedora Core 4, and i've been looking for about a week for a driver that would give me video playback, widescreen, etc...

The other problem you *might* run into is the CPU (see your /proc/cpuinfo file)... the stepping technology dosn;t work right off the bat on linux. Mine was always stuck at 997Mhz but now i can switch it manually from Gnome... Also: did u notice a weird electronic noise (like a hum) from the right side of the computer when you stress the CPU? i'd like to know if it's normal or not.

I'd appreciate it if u let me know about the video card. Thanks :> let me know if u need any help with anything else.

unfortunately I've been running a liveCD version of ubuntu, trying to get it to work, and since I haven't gotten it to get past the gnome splash screen, I've been too scared to format my drive and reinstall gnu/linux.

I'm unfortunately running xp home, but will hopefully soon be dual booting xp x_64 and ubuntu for the AMD64


I'll let you know if I grow balls and get this to work!

I could not even install FedoraCore3. It just hangs at /sbin/loader. I tried all kinds of boot options(nousb,noprobe..etc) , but nothing helped. I was able to boot off Puppy Live cd which was good and worked seamless. I think I will try Suse9.1. I read multimedia support is bad in recent suse9.2 version. By the wasy how is the performance on x86_64bit mode.

Hello, I recently bought a HP zv6000. I have had no luck getting FC2, FC3, FreeBSD 5.4, Suse 9.2 64bit or FC3 32bit systems to install. All but Suse hangs after the initial menu screen, I think when it tries to switch to a graphical mode. There isn't much configuration available in the BIOS, you can change how the video memory is configured and disable the wireless card. Suse 9.2 actually gets through the configuring of the disk but hangs after the format.

I was able to load Suse 9.1 32bit, but the network (wired) would only send and not receive anything. I watched with tcpdump on one of my other systems and I saw the arp requests and arp replies but running tcpdump on my laptop showed nothing received;(.

I was able to get Solaris 10 64bit to load alright with network (wired.) No wireless and the sound card is not found. I would like to stick with Solaris if I can get the wireless and sound working, but I'm going to try FC4 if I can get it to download.

Hello. I guess you tried all the versions possible. But did you try suse 9.1. Also, how is the performance of solaris 10 on it. Is it dual boot? If you like, try out Zones in solaris. It is really interesting and beautiful.

I did try Suse 9.1 the 32bit version which the network card wouldn't work. I originally wanted to dual boot but since I can't get Linux to load I am only running Solaris 10. I am working with 4Front Technologies trying to get their driver for the sound card to work. I haven't tried out Zones, but I'll take a look.

I am very happy with Solaris 10 except for the Sound/WIFI issues. I haven't done much except try to get these things to work. I have downloaded Oracle but haven't got it setup yet.

I have a zv6000 as well and I'm having hell trying to get a decent distro to even setup on it. Has anyone tried Suse 9.3 on it?

Thanks,

Well at least I now know it's not some hardware issue with my laptop. However it looks like a global issue with this particular model. I haven't tried Suse 9.3, I am trying to get bittorrent to load on my desktop system which runs Suse 9.1 32bit; so I can download the latest Mandrake and see if I have any luck with that. It looks as the sound driver isn't going to work on this model with Solaris 10 at this point. They did say they have a new version of the driver close to release for the sound card. I'll keep y'all posted with my progress here.