HP Pavilion ze5300 Series
1. The Laptop
Manufacturer: Hewlett Packard
Model: xt5377qv
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R)4 2.66GHz
RAM: 512MB
Hard drive capacity: 40GB + 250GB USB
2. Hardware
CD/DVD read: works
CD/DVD write: not tested (CD write only)
LAN: works
Wireless: works (see additional information)
Sound: works
Video: works (radeon driver)
USB: works
Firewire: not tested
Media card reader: (none present)
Touchpad or other pointing device: works
Accelerator buttons (music, DVD, web, other): 2 of 5 work (see add'l info)
Adaptive CPU speed: not tested
Sense battery level: works
Suspend (manual): suspends but won't resume (see add'l info)
Suspend (close lid): suspends but won't resume
3. Additional information
3.0.1. Dual boot Windows XP / CentOS 5.0
CentOS is installed on one partition of the external USB hard drive. I was unable to get the HP Pavilion to boot CentOS from the USB drive. The boot loader would get as far as loading the kernel, but then the kernel was unable to mount the root partition on the USB device.
After re-partitioning the internal hard drive to create a 500MB /boot partition, I was able to successfully install with the root on the external drive. Grub is configured to boot XP by default, because I was not able to find a way to have it select XP when the USB drive is unplugged and CentOS when it is plugged in.
I have since successfully upgraded to CentOS 5.1.
3.0.2. Wireless
The default Broadcom driver (bcm43xx kernel module) does not function with the wireless NIC when the access point is using WEP with SHARED authentication. I had to install ndiswrapper and copy the Broadcom driver from the XP partition. See Comments.
With OPEN authentication, ndiswrapper fails but bcm43xx works. I recommend sticking with the default modules and avoiding shared WEP.
3.0.3. Accelerator Buttons
Th ze5300 has 5 "one touch" buttons labeled with icons for email, TV (switch to S/Video output, I assume), web browser, lock, and help. Only the email and web buttons generate distinct X events (keycodes 236 and 178 respectively) that could be bound to actions. I did not test S/Video, and the lock and help buttons do nothing that is detectable.
3.0.4. Suspend/Resume
Suspend appears to correctly write state to the disk, but on resume the USB devices are not re-enabled early enough so the root drive is unavailable and the system hangs. I suspect that suspend/resume would work correctly if CentOS were installed entirely on the internal drive.
4. Comments
Following is an excerpt from email I sent to the centos list when setting up the wireless (I'll clean this up in a later edit):
- Installed dkms, dkms-ndiswrapper, dkms-fuse, fuse, and fuse-ntfs-3g from RPMforge. (Thanks again, Dag.)
- Mounted my Windows drive with ntfs-3g.
- Located bcmwl5a.inf and installed it with ndiswrapper -i.
- Changed the modprobe.conf alias for eth1 from bcm43xx to ndiswrapper.
- Edited /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant and set the interface to eth1 and the driver to ndiswrapper.
- Copied the appropriate configuration from the examples in /usr/share/doc/ into /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and edited the ssid, key and auth_alg.
Shut down NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher because they were still trying to access the device with the bcm43xx driver.
- Unloaded all the modules related to bcm43xx with "rmmod".
- Loaded the ndiswrapper module with "modprobe".
- Restarted the wpa_supplicant service.
And lo! eth0 (wired net) has been deactivated, and eth1 is up, connected to the AP, and has obtained the expected IP address (I entered the MAC addr into the router to force DHCP to return a specific address for this NIC). All wonderful so far ...
However, I can't ping any other IP address on the network (not even the AP itself); everything says "destination unreachable". There's no default route, and attempting to add one induces the DNS-related sytem crawl I've been discussing on another thread (only while the route is being added, it clears up once the route is there).
Further, /etc/sysconfig/hwconf still says the driver for eth1 is bcm43xx. I edited that manually to change it to ndiswrapper, but upon reboot it got reset back to bcm43xx. I have to manually rmmod bcm43xx and modprobe ndiswrapper before I can connect to the AP again.
- Added "blacklist bcm43xx" to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
chkconfig {NetworkManager,NetworkManagerDispatcher,wpa_supplicant} off
- Used system-config-network-gui to configure wireless and set it to active at boot
Hey, presto! I have wireless networking.
I would sort of like to get NetworkManager working so I can choose among available networks, but this will do for now.
Side-effect of "blacklist" is that eth1 has disappeared from hwconf entirely.
Both the wired and wireless networks active (though I suspect that if NetworkManager were running it would insist on turning one of them off).
In fact, even with the wired network unplugged, eth0 thinks it's up and has a route for my wired LAN. I'd rather it detected that the cable was unplugged and didn't add the route, but that's another minor nit.