HP Pavilion DV4000

Hi,
I just bought a new laptop. A HP Pavilion DV4000 (DV4305US to be exact). I was wondering if anybody has had any expieriance with using linux on this model laptop... as far as hardware compatability and such goes. It has a 1.4GHz Celeron, 512MB DDR, 80GB hard drive, a DVD-RW drive, and internal wireless 802.11b/g. If anybody knows any about installing linux on this laptop and what modules I should use, or if there are any glaring incompatabilities with the hardware that comes on this laptop, it would be a big help. I know I'm being rather vegue, but I was just taking a long shot that somebody may have already installed linux on one of these and could tell me how it went.

Thanks,
Marshall

www.tux-mobile.com You can look there to check people's experiances. I think HP uses broadcom chipsets for wireless, which AFAIK means you're going to have to use ndiswrapper for it. Otherwise, I think a lot of hardware is supported, the only other thing you may have trouble with is the modem, but you don't list that as something you want working. I don't have one of these, but I do have a Compaq Presario 2104US.

Is it a Centrino? Then HP uses Intel Pro Wireless (either 2100 or 2200) drivers for the wireless. It'll use Broadcom TG3 drivers for the ethernet. I have an HP NC6000 that is pretty easy to set up - depending on the distro.

I have a broadcom wireless 802.11b/g internal wireless on this laptop. I've been looking around but I can't find the model that ships with this laptop. Thats the main thing I'm afraid wont work in linux. Along with maybe the modem, S-Video port, and the cable that goes to my cell phone to use it as a modem. I have fired this thing up with linux before and the video card, sound card, usb, etc appears to work. I didn't try the DVD-+RW drive though, I'm a little afraid that wont work either, and I want that... thats one of the main reasons I bought this model over some others that didn't support DVD+-RW. Has anybody successfully got all this stuff to work in linux on this laptop?

I have an HP Pavilion that I "custom" ordered so I don't know the model number. I do know the processor is an AMD turion 64 mobile technology. I've installed Fedora core 5 and had been trying to set it up. One thing that really bugs me is while the nic works fine and I can connect to the internet, the onboard wireless card (Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN) is not recognized. How do I get this thing to work?

I used ndiswrapper. Check and see if the internal wireless card is the same as mine, if it is, your probably in luck. Do lspci (in a term), and see if you get an entery that looks like this:

06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

That is the wireless controller, and although as far as I know it is not supported by a native linux driver, you can use ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper allows you to use windows drivers (inf/sys) on a linux system... it is intended to get wireless cards working, but appears to also work for some other networky type stuff like modems and ethernet cards I hear. I have ndiswrapper 1.14 installed, but it probably works with other versions. I went to www.hp.com and searched for the windows drivers for my card. Then I just installed ndiswrapper and loaded the windows drivers into it, then modprobed it, and configured the network with iwconfig (do man iwconfig if you dont know how to work it, its pretty easy). My laptop is a DV4305US, so I'm not sure if yours will need the exact same drivers... try to use the same drivers that you would have used on windows. When I was first setting this up I tried to use drivers from other manufacturers that used the same chipset, and they didn't seem to work, I think that may be because the pciid was wrong though. If you need help working ndiswrapper, just look at the docs, it's pretty simple.

The only problem I have had with the wireless is that that little blue light in the center at the top of the keyboard that is suppost to come on when the wireless networking is enabled doesn't come on when the card is used anymore. I assume that must have been software controlled rather then by the WIFI nic it's self, but that's not really that big a deal. It doesn't affect the function of the card, and I've been thinking about doing something cool with it like making it blink when I get a message on gaim or email or whatever if I can figure out how it is controlled. I think the button still does turn the card off, however, when I tried it, the connection died, and then after pressing it again I couldn't get it to come back up and had to reboot, so unless you can figure out how that works I suggest just not pushing the button.

Hope this helps,
Marshall