...scribed 2007, the early years of the downfall of the assimilative empire known as Microsoft...

I intend for this to:
1) Be a record of achieved functionality concerning the installation of Debian 4.0 'etch' on an HP Pavilion zv6000 laptop & future reference for anyone doing an install on the same or similar laptop (or if I lose the notebook I've written this all down in), and
2) Use as few instances of the letter 'i' as possible because the keycap just popped off and went gods know where.

I will be adding to this as I solve problems and get things to work.

Machine: HP Pavilion zv6000
BIOS: Phoenix
CPU: AMD Athlon64 @ 1800MHz
Video: Radeon Xpress 200M
RAM: 1GB
Hard Drive: WD600 (replacement)
Optical Drive: TSST Corp. CD/DVD RW/R (replacement)
FireWire: Texas Instruments OHCI-compliant IEEE-1394 controller
Touchpad: Synaptics PS/2 port touchpad
Modem: AC97 Data Fax SoftModem w/SmartCP
Wireless: Broadcom 80211.b/g WLAN
Ethernet: Realtek TRL8139/810x family fast Ethernet
PCMCIA: Texas Instruments PCI xx21/x515 Cardbus controller
Datacard Slot (SDI, etc.): Texas Instruments PCI xx21 Integrated Flash Controller
SCSI: D347PRT SCSI Controller
Audio: Conexant AC-Link
USB: Standard Enhanced PCI to USB controller
Standard OpenHCD USB Host controller
Motherboard: HP 3085

Most hardware worked correctly straight from a default install. The following did not work, were lacking in functionality, or needed manual configuration (this is not a list of gripes, more of a to-do checklist):

Wireless:
-- Hardware is recognized and supported, but for legal reasons the firmware cannot be shipped with the distribution
-- WPA is not supported by default

Keyboard/Quick-launch/Volume buttons:
-- Top four illuminated quick-launch keys do not work
-- Front-panel volume and mute buttons do not work
-- "Windows" key does nothing

SD Card Slot:
-- Not supported

DVD Playback:
-- Cannot play encrypted material

Power Management:
-- Hibernation does not work
-- Suspend seems to work, but will not resume

Video:
-- No 3D rendering
-- Alternate VGA video-out does not work


===> Fixes

Video:
-- No 3D rendering with default open source ATI drivers
Uninstalled default ATI drivers thru Synaptic, downloaded & installed AMD/ATI's binary drivers, rebooted.
This fix is transient at best, I only tolerated proprietary ATI drivers sticking in my craw because I wanted to run Beryl; I'm learning that the needed 'composite' functionality is not provided by ATI's binary drivers, at least not on this video chipset, so I'll soon be going back to the open source drivers. To be further looked into.
-- 'Fn' + F4 doesn't toggle btwn local/alt/local+alt vid out
Still working on this.

DVD Playback:
-- Did not have libdvdcss, which allows for the decryption of DVD content.
Downloaded the .tar.gz from videolan.org, did the usual "./configure --prefix=/usr;make;sudo make install" dance, and Totem plays any DVD I've thrown at it.

Keyboard/Quick-launch/Volume buttons:
-- The keycodes associated with the "Windows" key, the top 4 quick-launch and the three front-panel volume buttons were not associated with any keysym or event.
Downloaded xbindkeys
Ran `xbindkeys --key` to find keycodes for keys in question:

• "Windows" key: m:0x40 + c:115 (*)
• DVD key: m:0x0 + c:237
• Music key: m:0x0 + c:118
• WWW key: m:0x0 + c:178
• Vol. Up key: m:0x0 + c:174
• Vol. Down key: m:0x0 + C:176
• Mute key: m:0x0 + c:160 (pressing both volume buttons generates this information as well)

(*) This is slightly wrong; it's actually m:0x10, I don't know why it's reported as 0x40, but that number won't work for the xbindkeys example below

The wireless activation button was not recognized by either `xbindkeys --key` or `xev`; it illuminates when the wireless device is activated and the driver is loaded (see below) and darkens when the device is brought down, but pressing the button apparently does nothing at all so far as my lappy is concerned.

Ran to create an xbindkeys config file, and added the following to it:
In this case, I'm using the "Windows" key to launch 3dDesk and view my desktops; Shift + Windows will run `3ddesk --acquire` and update the snapshots of my screens so the 3D view is accurate.

SD Card slot:
Still working on this. I don't use SD cards at all, really, so don't hold yer breath.

Hibernation/Suspend:
--System hangs upon hibernation; suspend seems to work OK, but system locks upon resume
Still working on this; looking into s2disk and powersaved. This will most likely be the next problem solved, I use hibernation extensively on my laptop (closing all apps and shutting down every time gets old quick).

Wireless:
--Firmware not present
Installed bcm43xx-fwcutter thru Synaptic, followed fwcutter's menu. Wireless device can now be brought up and configured for network use.
--WPA not supported
Still checking out wpa_supplicant and xsupplicant

For libdvdcss decryption, I find http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ quick and easy--just add it to /etc/apt/source.list, and you can get dvd playback as well as mplayer and other mplayer based players. The one which I find works best, generally, is kplayer.

What video chip is in your laptop? I've so far only messed with a radeon 9250 and an all-in-wonder 7500 with Etch, so far (both desktop AGP cards); I found that I needed to fiddle around quite a bit to get them functional with Beryl.

Radeon Xpress 200M. Forgot to put that in when I posted originally.