Ubuntu Linux on a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv1000 (dv1066ea) notebook

The HP dv1066ea notebook

I'd been looking for a replacement laptop for some months and finally settled on one of HP's 'Entertainment' dv1000 series of notebooks - the dv1066ea. ( This model is now obsolete - the dv1200 is the nearest current model). It's relatively small and light, but enough power and capacity for what I need. Plus it's really good for watching DVDs on

At the time, the UK seemed to only get two dv1000 models; the 1066 and the slightly less powerful 1049. HP's online UK shop doesn't seem to cater for home buyers, so I had to settle for a standard model. Ideally I would have liked the BrightView screen and the 80Gb hard drive, but I'm happy enough with the 1066.

The 1066 and 1049 seem to be identical except for the CPU (1.6GHz vs 1.4Ghz) and hard drive (60Gb vs 40Gb). I wanted more disk space and it never hurts to have a faster CPU

The QuickPlay function is handy, as it turns the dv1066 into a standalone DVD/CD/MP3 player with no need to boot into Windows (or Linux) first. Actually, that's not quite true, as QuickPlay is a Linux based system that occupies around 200Mb of the disk and gets DVDs playing in about 10 seconds from power off.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

Having researched as much as I could, it seemed that the dv1066 should be well supported by Linux. Other laptops with the same Intel Pro 2200 Wireless chipset had been reported to work with Ubuntu and I really like the distribution (Debian based but with almost all the hard work configuring it working 'out of the box'). I took the Ubuntu Hoary LiveCD along with me to my local PC World store (I don't often use them, but the price was pretty much the same wherever I looked, and they are close) and asked if I could give it a go. The assistant I got seemed quite bemused by the request, but was happy to let me try.

The first, default, bootup failed part way through (Googling later revealed it needs the noapic boot option). I tried again with the failsafe option and waited for a while until it came up with the Ubuntu login screen. It was a bit streched-looking, as the chosen resolution was 1024x768 rather than the native 1280x768. It appeared to have picked up all the hardware (from the ouput of dmesg, lspci and lsmod) so I bought it

I started off by resizing the Windows (XP Home, would have preferred XP Pro) NTFS partition using PartitionMagic which I thought the safer option than Parted or similar. I was wrong. Right at the end of the resize it threw up an error, and the Windows partition was hosed. I could see it from a Linux session (SystemRescueCd) but it wouldn't boot. I ended up deleting the NTFS partition and creating a 10Gb FAT32 partition to replace it. Out came the product recovery CDs - Windows went on okay, but the HP driver/utilities disk locked up twice before it was all running okay. The dv1066 came with a raft of MS software (Works, Autoroute, Money, etc), none of which I'm interested in, so I didn't bother reinstalling any of that.

Installing Ubuntu was much easier by comparison. Other than the noapic issue (I didn't resolve that until later) there were no major problems. I opted for an expert install so I could make sure the install went onto the 45Gb unused space, rather than the recently recovered XP partition. The GUI logon came up in its stretched form, and I hadn't been able to get the wireless network running, but otherwise all was okay. Sound worked, which was good The wireless side was fine once I realised the wireless card wasn't always enabled at boot up, and I had to press the wireless button to get it working. In Windows it starts automatically, and even lights up a blue LED to show it. The button still works in Linux, but the LED doesn't I had pressed this several times, but it sometimes takes a few seconds to activate, and I assumed it hadn't been detected at first. Breezy should support this okay - I have it running now. Other than that, there is the Gnome wireless applet showing wireless availability and it is also possible to find the state of the wireless hardware from the command line

$ cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/*/rf_kill

should give 0 if the kill switch is off (ie wireless is up). If the kill switch is on (no wireless) you get 1 on Warty (2.6.8 kernel) or 2 on Hoary (2.6.10) To get the LED working (with the 2.6.12 kernel from the upcoming Breezy) run this

sudo echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/{pci-id}/led

where pci-id is the id for the Intel BG2200 chipset in lspci - for me that's 0000:02:06.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05) I have this in a boot script to make sure it's there for use later. You can also get the same result when loading the ipw2200 module:

$ sudo modprobe ipw2200 led=1

To get the correct aspect ratio on the screen I added "1280x768" to the list of screen sizes in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 but it had no effect. More Googling identified a need for a Modeline entry to match 1280x768 - once that was done I got the native 1280x768 resolution. It looks really good 3D acceleration works fine (glxgears reports around 470 fps), so I can play Tuxracer on it...

for Hoary: The live CD generates the right screen size The upgrade from XFree86 to XOrg went very smoothly. XF86Config? was copied over to xorg.conf without changes.

I'll add more details as I find out what works and what doesn't.

for Hoary: Even more hardware is supported now - this is what I have working

• Screen: 1280x768 native resolution
• Sound (Hoary uses esd which required a few tweaks for non-Ubuntu apps like mplayer)
• CPU scaling: Steps of 200Mhz from 600MHz to 1.6GHz
• 3D: GLXGears gives 471.8 fps
• CD writer, DVD writer
• MPlayer: Xv output works for dvd:// links, now XOrg is used. The remote control works well for MPlayer navigation
• Suspend/hibernate: Both suspend to Ram and suspend to disk work well once configured. See HoaryPM for details.
• Networking: The onboard wired (eth0) and wireless (eth1) work, though I've got an issue with eth1 and suspend to RAM - I have to reload ipw2200 manually even though it gets done as part of the resume function.
• USB: I use USB for a mouse and digital camera with no issues.

Issues Past and Present

I couldn't get wireless encryption working with Warty, though I must admit I didn't spend much time on it. With Hoary and a little bit of help from GTKWifi getting WEP working was easy. What is still a problem is the wireless connection dying early on after bootup. Within the first twenty minutes or so, the connection will die, and the only way to get it back is to unload, then reload the ipw2200 module. Once that is done the connection stays up indefinitely. Using the 2.6.12 kernel from Ubuntu's upcoming Breezy Badger adds LED support to the ipw2200 module (the driver is now at version 1.0.6 - Hoary's 2.6.10 kernel includes version 0.19). I'm waiting to see if this fixes the dropped connection problem. I finally have a stable wireless connection I've not needed to reload the ipw2200 module since using 2.6.12.

Links

There are quite a few other sites that include good information on getting Linux working on the dv1000 series. I'll add them here as I find them. If you know of any that should be included, let me know. Either that, or register? and add them yourself.

• Gentoo on an HP Pavilion dv1067 Much more comprehensive than this, cough, HOWTO
• HOWTO: WPA and ipw2200
• Ubuntu's Wi-Fi HOWTO
• Linux on a laptop:A Tinkerer's Journal An interesting review of installing and running Ubuntu on a dv1156.

Appendix

Here are some of my config files and other generated output, in case they're of use.

/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 - These are the changes from Ubuntu generated default. Generally I've just added a few lines, but a few were changed. You can also view the full XF86Config-4.

Section "Device"
        Option          "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Modeline        "1280x768" 80.14 1280 1344 1480 1680 768 769 772 795
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        DefaultDepth    16
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           16
                Modes           "1280x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24   
           Modes           "1280x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

The output from lspci and lsmod may help

-- MartinRowe - 12 Aug 2005