I’ve got a weird one here. I just bought an HP zv5000, a 5410us to be specific. It has the AMD Athlon 64, NVIDIA Gforce 4 440 and all the bells and whistles. I Installed Mandrake 10.1 on it and everything is set up just fine. However, when I load down the onboard NIC by (from a console) FTPing an ISO off one of my servers it core dumps! I can surf all day (in KDE) but if I try to transfer a large file it’s like the buffers get full and it craps out. If I try to FTP a large file using my browser then the NIC dies to the point that a “Service network restart” won’t even bring it back; instead I have to reboot the box and then it will work again, until I push it too far again. BTW, the nic is a Realtek-8139 according to XP and Mandrake. Mandrake is using the “8139too” module to run it.

I have also noticed that Mandrake sees the CPU as an 800mhz AMD when it’s a 1.8Ghz AMD so I wonder if this is causing any problems.

Oh, one more thing is my PCMCIA controller is not being recognized under Linux. I tried to stick another NIC in the box to get around the onboard NIC problem but it doesn’t see it.

Any ideas?

-Cat

I have this same laptop.

Congratulations on your purchase of what may well be the biggest POS to ever roll out of HPaQ ... I almost returned mine, but my inability to back down from a challenge finally saw me through to getting FreeBSD working on it.

Most of the problems with this laptop can be attributed to the fact that the BIOS in it is complete and total garbage, but there are cheap hacks and config changes you can make to make the thing run. The biggest stability improvement you can make is to make sure you're running a UP kernel. SMP kernels led me to lockup after lockup, or some other strange behavior.

There's a whole lot of info on the net about these machines and the problems they have running anything but Windows. You can find a lot of it by googling for "R3000z Linux" and "HP 5000 Linux" (The same laptop with a Compaq badge is the R3000z).

Here is a page on TuxMobile to get you started.

It is possible. I had a working Gentoo system installed on mine for a while, but I trashed it once I got BSD working on it.

Good luck!

Just my luck! Thanks for the info... i'm gonna check out Tux M... and if I figure it out i'll let you know. Thanks again!
-Cat

SIGSEGV,
Have you ever tried mepis?? I found some stuff on the net that says it may work as well.
-Cat

No, I'm a BSD baby down to my bones. I've used Mepis before though, and have a relative that swears by it. Being Debian derived, it's probably quite good.

To more directly answer your query about PCMCIA issues -- that's one of the things that requires config hacking. See this comment from this page:

That's not entirely true. Cardbus will work, but you have to flip a bit in the PCI memory range, and as luck would have it, I can't recall the address ... I'll google a bit for it and see if I can turn it up. If nothing else I'll look in my backup of the Gentoo I had installed and get it out of there (I put it in rc.local so I could use my ath card ).

Grab the config.opts file and go from there.

Thanks!! I also noticed that in /var/log/boot.log I have 0meg HIMEM and 512meg LOWMEM...!!!??? I think this might be an issue as well. MAn this sucks!!
-Cat

Sounds like you're fighting multiple issues. Hardware compatibility, BIOS (a big factor here I think), and Mandrake which is one of the buggiest/hacked distros you can get.

I'm not knocking Mandrake just to start a flame war, I used it myself way back when, but it's known to have problems and always has. You may bave better luck using another distro as there are some hardware set-ups Mandrake simply doesn't like.

This should make the cardbus cards work:

All,
Well… I installed MEPIS 3.3 and all is well. If yall haven’t tried this distro then you are passing up something beautiful! Everything works and with some tweaking in the /etc/X11/XF86config the Nvidia Gforce4 440 go is working too. I am still working on the open GL but I can live with it for now.

One thing I am most impressed with is the package manager.. it pulls from all the debian pools, checks for dependencies and gets you going quick. It’s awesome!

I don’t think I’m gonna go back to mandrake anytime soon!

Thanks for all you help and good luck with you HPs!!

-Cat

Glad to hear it's all working for you.

Yes, Debian's apt is one of the best systems for managing packages available (though Yum has it's strong points as well).

Great! I like Mepis myself. Warren does a great job with his distro.

You also have to add the include port and include memory ranges specific to one's own machine to etc/pcmcia/config.opts ?
This can be found by typing lspci -v ?

Correct ??
I also have an atheros cardbus card but cannot get it to work.... I haven't tried adding to rc.local yet though. Is there anything else I should know?


Thanks for the help!!

Edit: I just found out I have no rc.local file.... I am using a Debian installation, which file do I put those commands into ??

thank you.