[NTLUG:Discuss] Success! HP DV9620US laptop fully functional!

[Stephen Davidson]

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Hi Wayne.

Broadcom seems to have started releasing decent drivers back in Q4 of
last year -- at least, that's when an upgrade first started picking them
up.  In regards to nVidia, sleep/resume stopped working with their
drivers for me last year, and has not yet started again.  The last major
patch, laptop will go into Hibernate, but seems to kernel panic on
resume.  (HP Pavillion zv5000, btw - or was until an HP Repair, I think
they upgraded the MB, but not sure to what)

Regards,
Steve

Wayne Dahl wrote:
| I have a success story...finally!  I had Kubuntu 7.10 installed on this
| laptop after I got it (and the Gibbon came out) and everything except
| the wireless NIC worked.  Even the built in webcam worked to snap
| pictures, take videos with and use with Kopete for Yahoo chats (haven't
| tried it for MSN chats, but the docs say it'll work).
|
| However, I couldn't get the wireless to work, no way, no how.  I tried
| so much crap from so many different pages trying to get it to work that
| I think it was permanently fubar.   Because of that, I didn't EVEN want
| to try doing an upgrade.  So I opted to do a fresh install of Kubuntu
| 8.04 AFTER a few months had gone by after to release, so as to let
| Canonical come up with patches for some of the left over bugs.
|
| The downside to doing a fresh install was the time I had to put in
| getting everything back the way I wanted it after I foolishly tried
| Compiz again.  Compiz just does not like this laptop (or maybe it's
| nVidia is just doesn't like...never had ANY luck with it running nVidia
| video cards, but that may be because of my choice of video cards) and it
| totally screwed up KDE when I tried to remove it.  I took some advice I
| found on a Kubuntu forum and renamed the .kde folder to .kde_old, then
| restarted the laptop.  ALL of my configuration stuff was now gone and I
| had a fresh KDE install.
|
| Well, I now have it all back to normal.  This laptop has a Broadcom
| wireless NIC in it and Broadcom has a really bad reputation when it
| comes to Linux.  I was ready to buy an HP Intel PRO NIC (found one on
| sale online for less than $50) which should have alleviated the issue
| with the BIOS not recognizing it (a "feature" HP builds into a lot of
| their laptops) but I decided to give the latest version of Kubuntu a
| try.  I did the install, activated all the repositories, including
| restricted, did a full update of the system before trying to activate
| the restricted drivers (the nVidia and the Broadcom).  The nVidia driver
| just installed the restricted (proprietary) nVidia driver and everything
| just worked (no tweaking of xorg.conf to get more than 2 screen
| resolutions).  The Broadcom driver was almost as easy.  After selecting
| it, Kubuntu told me I needed to download the restricted drivers, do you
| want to do so...yes.  After downloading the driver, it told me I needed
| bcm43xx-fwcutter, do you want to do so...yes.  After that ran, said it
| was done, I rebooted the laptop to see KNetworkManager asking for my WPA
| key.  I'm assuming that Kubuntu automatically downloaded and installed
| WPASupplicant since I didn't install it...or maybe it's just a part of
| the default installation.  At any rate, for the first time, I've been
| able to connect wirelessly to my Netgear wireless AP.
|
| Before 802.11 was working, I had to use a Novatel Ovation broadband
| modem on the Sprint network for internet access...to the tune of an
| extra $60 a month for unlimited data transfers.  No more.  I still have
| the Sprint account in the event I don't have WiFi access, but still need
| internet access.  That's being evaluated at this time, though.
|
| Allen, was that what you were talking about?  Sprint has decent
| instructions on how to get their broadband wireless access working with
| Linux.  However, I agree with most of the others here...broadband
| wireless access would be a last resort.  I would do what I could to get
| WiFi working first.  But I can relate to your questions with this laptop.
|
| One thing I haven't had the courage to try with this laptop is
| hibernate/sleep/resume.  I tried it on the Gibbon and it didn't work
| very well at all.  Anyone have any luck with it on the Heron?
|
| Thanks for listening to my gibberish...I just had to share my success.
| Most people hear HP and run screaming in the other direction.  I suppose
| I've been lucky to have had the success I have with this laptop.
|
| Wayne
|
| _______________________________________________
| http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

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