Installing Fedora Core 6 on an HP Pavilion dv9000

Attention Readers

This page is old. Outdated. Linux support on my laptop has improved dramatically since I first bought and installed Fedora Core 6 over 1.5 years ago. Most of the information on this page is probably misleading or just plain wrong, I don't know. Rather than try to bit-by-bit update the page, I'm simply going to summarize my current state here in red.

Currently, I run the latest Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy". Everything works except for suspend/sleep and hibernate. Those two functions may work with desktop effects (compiz) off, I don't know, I haven't tried. But I'd rather have the effects anyways. Everything else I can think of works just fine. Sound (speakers and headphones), microphone, nVidia display with full 1680x1050 resolution, touchpad, hotkeys and volume keys, HDMI out, and even the SD card reader work fine!

I haven't tested a few obscure things like the modem, SD-out, firewire (1394) port, PCMCIA slot, and the expansion port. Seriously, I've never used those things for as long as I've had this laptop.

This will most likely be my last update to this page. Any specific questions feel free to email me! My address is at the bottom of the page.

-Andrew
Feb 14, 2008

Note: As of April 12 2007, I have switched to Ubuntu. I have found the hardware support is much better, and more things "just work." This includes sound and the headphone ports, which work as expected, nVidia drivers are in the repository and easy to install and compiz works immediately afterwards, all keyboard shortcuts are already bound (and the mute button turns amber when muted!), and wireless needed no additional tinkering.

I'm really impressed with this. Suspend/resume also works almost perfectly, albeit not with compiz. I'm going to leave this guide up, but any new support or features in Fedora since the above date aren't reflected, so take that into account if you use this to gague how well this laptop works with linux.

I may go back to Fedora at some point in the future. in which case I will probably update this page.

Last Updated Feb 23 2007
Recently Added (Feb 23 2007): I just noticed that headphone support has apparently been added! My headphone ports work, and there is an entry for them in the mixer
Recently Added (Jan 13 2007): Link to success story on compiling alsa from scratch (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=305712). And also re-arranged bits.
Recently Updated (Dec 3 2006): Notes about suspend sometimes working
Recently Added (Nov 28 2006): External display output works!
Recently Updated (Nov 27 2006): Notes about headphone ports working (works with latest alsa drivers I hear)

Recently I bought an HP Pavilion dv9000 direct from the HP website. Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was install linux. On this page I hope to document most everything I did to get this laptop to a usable state, what went wrong, and what I did to fix things.
Summary: Overall, I'd rate this laptop usable with linux, despite a few things that didn't work quite right. The 1680x1050 resolution is very nice, as I'm able to fit a lot in, and the desktop effects work very smoothly.
This is my first guide/tutorial/reference that I've written, any comments or suggestions are welcome. My email address is at the bottom of this page.

Hardware setup

This line of laptops is customizable on their website, here's what I selected mine to include, and how it works in linux.
For a slightly more complete list of things that worked and didn't work, see the Just Installed section.

Hardware	Status in Linux	Notes
Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7200 (2.0 GHz)	Works	An SMP kernel makes good use of both cores
17.0" WSXGA+ BrightView Widescreen (1680x1050)	Works	Full resolution out of the box
256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600	Works	Used nvidia binary kernel drivers from livna.org. See below
HP IMPRINT Finish + Microphone	Doesn't work	The built-in microphone, that is
1.0GB DDR2 SDRAM (2X512MB)	Works
100GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive	Works	SATA drive (correctly) appears as /dev/sda
Super Multi 8X DVD+/-R/RW w/Double Layer Support	Works/Untested	Burning untested, reading works fine
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network w/Bluetooth	Works	Requires binary drivers, details below
Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller	Partially works	Speakers and headphones work, but the internal speakers don't automatically mute when you plug in headphones. Built-in microphone untested, but I don't think it works.
High Capacity 8 Cell Li-Ion Battery	Works	Linux knows all about this through /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info

Note that I didn't get the one with the built-in webcam. I'm not sure why, it wasn't any more money if I remember right. I guess I didn't think I would use it much, or I didn't think it would work with linux, or something. Either way, you can let me know if yours works, but don't ask me if it works 'cause I don't know.

Initial Setup

My first step was to boot up Windows and delete/uninstall much of the crapware as I could. All the trial software that is only usable for 60 days...etc. I wanted to keep windows on the computer for the occasional game or two that won't work under WINE. I managed to get the used space down from 15 GB to 10 GB approx.
I also burned the recovery DVDs, which takes 3 blank DVDs or 2 blank dual layer DVDs (or 15 cds or something absurd like that, I had 3 blank dvds on hand). I felt compelled to do this because I planned on erasing the 10 Gig partition used for the recovery data.

My final partition layout was to look like this:

/dev/sda1  25GB   Windows
/dev/sda2  100MB  Boot partition
/dev/sda3  20GB   Root (/)
/dev/sda4         extended
/dev/sda5  1.5GB  Swap
/dev/sda6  45GB   /home partiton

Before resizing the windows NTFS partition, a scandisk was necessary. I had to do that to fix an error so that the filesystem can be resized properly.
Then I booted into knoppix, really any boot disk with fdisk and ntfsresize utilities will do. I followed the instructions, which boiled down to ntfsresize --info /dev/sda1 to check the disk for errors, ntfsresize -n -s 25G /dev/sda1 to do a dry-run and make sure no errors were encountered, and finally ntfsresize -s 25G /dev/sda1 to actually resize it. The last one got an error for me, suggesting to make sure windows was shutdown properly. I just had to boot into windows, and shut it down again and it worked.
Now that the filesystem had been resized, I needed to shrink the partition. Into fdisk, I deleted all the partitions, and created a new primary partition 1, and for the size I entered "+24418768k" (if I remember correctly) which is approx. 25 Gigabytes. I wasn't sure if fdisk uses 2^10 or 10^3 for the kilo prefix (ntfsresize uses 10^3 SI prefixes, specified in the man page), so this may have been off by a few megabytes, but I didn't worry about it (it erred on being larger, so there may be a wasted 5 megabytes or so).

Installing

Installing Fedora Core 6 went smoothly. Choosing to do the remote installation rather than burning several cds/dvds, I downloaded the flash boot drive from ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/images/diskboot.img and used dd to write it to a flash drive I had handy. Once changing the boot order in the laptop's BIOS, the installation had begun. When asked where to find the installation files, I pointed it to mirror.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os (either ftp or http works) taking advantage of the local mirror that NCSU provides. Outside of NCSU can use ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os
Partitioning the drive I had it leave the NTFS partition alone and install in the free space. Other than that, I customized the layout myself as described above. The rest of the installation went smoothly, except I made the mistake of specifying a third party repository when it asked from where to install packages. As soon as the installation started it crapped out with some dependency error. Trying again without any other repos worked fine (I still checked the box to use Fedora Extras).

Just installed, what worked and what didn't

Just installed I was both surprised at what worked, and disappointed at what didn't. Here's a quick bulleted list.
Below is a more detailed explanation on what I did to get certain things working.

Full 1680x1050 resolution: Worked out of the box. This surprised me, but I was impressed, as my previous laptop with FC5 I had to get the 855resolution utility to try and get the correct resolution to display
Wireless: Works, but not right away. It uses the intel 3945 chip with requires the binary intel drivers to work. See below for what I did to get it working
Suspend/Hibernate: unstable. Suspend actually works most of the time, but once in a while it will fail to come back up.
Hibernate appeared to work but then started spewing disk read errors or something (I forget exactly) before I had to kill it. I've tried this at least twice and neither time worked.
I haven't pursued these issues any further, and while this is disappointing, I don't plan to because, as this is mostly a desktop replacement, and seeing how big it is, I don't plan to be taking this laptop with me very often. If this is essential for you, then you could always try the suspend2 patched kernel, available at atrpms and probably elsewhere also. Anyone who gets this to work, I'd love to hear about it, feel free to email.
Keyboard functions: Worked. The touchpad has a nice button to toggle it on and off, useful when typing so you don't accidentally hit it. It's done in hardware so no additional setup was needed. Also, the touch buttons at the top that control volume and such also worked, they can be set to various things with the keyboard shortcuts control panel (except for the leftmost "DVD" and "Quicklaunch" buttons, but more on that below)
Bluetooth: Assuming it works... because fedora seems to know it has a bluetooth adapter, and knows when I flip the physical switch to turn it on and off. However, I don't have any bluetooth devices to try it out with. I've recieved an email that bluetooth does work.
Sound: Works fine, nothing to say here, except...
Headphone ports: Now appear to work! although the speakers don't mute automatically when plugged in, this must be done manually. A script can probably be written to accompish this easily.
See below for a bit more info on this subject.
Built-in Microphone: untested. It hasn't worked previously, but since the headphone ports started working, I haven't tried this.
External Display output: works. The nvidia-settings program included with the latest nVidia drivers is a very nice interface for manipulating the diplay setup at runtime (without rebooting X). The only issue I found while testing VGA output is that it gets a bit messed up if the displays are set to TwinView mode AND desktop effects are enabled (the part of the displays that don't overlap on the external montior was garbled). Clone works fine, and turning off desktop effects fixes it also.
I didn't test HDMI output, only VGA, but I've gotten a report that it works fine also.

Things not tested:

HDMI output. (I don't have any HDMI displays to try it with, but I have heard that it works with the latest nVidia drivers)
Built-in Modem. Well, it has a phone plug, but I don't have dial-up to test it with =)
Anything not mentioned on this page, I've probably forgotten some things

NVidia Drivers

cube To get the nvidia drivers, I first installed the livna repository with rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm But since I've had bad luck with external repos conflicting with normal packages, I set the enabled= line to 0 in /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo.
Then installing the nividia drivers was a snap with yum install kmod-nvidia.i586 --enablerepo=livna --enablerepo=livna-testing The .i586 was due to a bug in anaconda mistakenly installing a 586 kernel. Try it first with just the kmod-nvidia package, and if it doesn't work, try the i586.

Note about the kernel bug I have heard that it's pretty easy to uninstall-reinstall the correct kernel version, if you think that's a better alternative I would look into that.

Note: I completely forgot about the nVidia configuration utilities, specifically nvidia-xconfig to edit your xorg.conf. Below is what I did, but you might have better luck with the config program.

In addition to installing, these lines were added to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Under "Device" section, add Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Under "Modules" section, add these two lines: Load "dbe" and Load "extmod"

Once the nvidia drivers were installed, I'm glad to say the AIGLX effects that came with FC6 worked flawlessly! Just go to System > Preferences > Desktop Effects and enable them, you get the nice wobbly windows as well as virtual desktops on the sides of a cube. Very nice indeed.

Keyboard shortcuts

While most of the cool touch buttons above the keyboard are bindable through the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel, the two touch buttons in the upper left aren't immediately bind-able. I was able to re-map them with the setkeycodes command. For example, I wanted to bind the left one to the "Pause" function, because that's the button to re-arrange all windows when desktop effects are enabled, but the actual pause button is hidden behind Fn-PgUp. To do this, I dropped this line into my /etc/rc.local: setkeycodes e008 119. e008 is the scancode for that button, and 119 is the keycode for Pause.
The scancode for the DVD button next to it is e00e. A list of all keycodes can be found in the output of dumpkeys

Also, while the other keys related to volume were bindable through the keyboard shortcuts preferences panel, the mute button won't turn amber when pushed like it does in windows. This is something that would be nice to have, but it's not too big of a deal. Thought I'd mention it here anyways.

Wireless

To get wireless working, I used the rpms from atrpms.net. First, drop this into /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo:

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0

Again, I put enabled=0 because I don't want regular updates pulling rpms from here, just for the specific installations I do (denoted by the --enablerepo switch to yum).
Next I downloaded these three files manually from atrpms.net, because of the i586 kernel bug, just doing yum install ipw3945 will install the incorrect kernel modules and you'll get an invalid kernel module format when you try to load them.
Instead, download ieee80211-kmdl-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-1.2.15-14.fc6.at.i586.rpm, ipw3945-1.0.12-11.1.fc6.at.i386.rpm, and ipw3945-kmdl-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-1.0.12-11.1.fc6.at.i586.rpm to some folder (I did this manually because of the kernel bug. If you're not affected, just a yum update ipw3945 will probably work. Or go to the site and find your correct kernel versions if you have a different kernel), and execute

yum localinstall --enablerepo=atrpms ieee80211-kmdl-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-1.2.15-14.fc6.at.i586.rpm ipw3945-1.0.12-11.1.fc6.at.i386.rpm ipw3945-kmdl-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-1.0.12-11.1.fc6.at.i586.rpm

Then, drop these lines into your /etc/modprobe.conf file:

alias eth1 ipw3945
install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 associate=1; sleep 0.5 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
remove ipw3945 /sbin/ipw3945d --kill ;/sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

and this line into your /etc/rc.local

/sbin/ipw3945d --quiet

and that should do it!

Sound, Headphones, and compiling Alsa

Headphones now appear to work. This information was written beforehand, as a tip that the latest alsa may fix them. There's probably not much need for it anymore.

So the deal is, headphones and microphones don't work with the currently supplied version of Alsa included with Fedora (1.0.12). Several people have had success with compiling alsa from source, although I have not (but haven't tried very extensively).

Versions 1.0.13 and later I've heard enable the use of the headphone ports, if not automatically, then toggled by a control in the mixer. I was also linked to a success story on compiling alsa. It was for Ubuntu, but the basic steps should be the same. I have not tried this yet, but I may soon (and I'll update this page if I'm successful). I'd appreciate any other information, success, or resources on this topic, so mail away!

Misc Info

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller AHCI (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce Go 7600] (rev a1)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
07:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0832
07:05.1 Class 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
07:05.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0843 (rev 01)
07:05.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a)
07:05.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 05)