A note to anyone who might be interested: I have run Debian testing on this laptop since Spring 2005. I believe that everything is working as well as it did under Gentoo (no 3D acceleration yet), and I have done no special configuration that I can remember.

Okay, I am having a really difficult time with the sound. ALSA appears to be working correctly, but sound only works a fraction of the time (i.e. three 30 second bursts in the past week). Here is my post to the Gentoo forums. If you have any idea how to get this working, please let me know. Also, HP’s printed documentation that comes with this laptop is really lacking. It is very non-technical and is not very helpful. They don’t even include a product specification sheet. After twenty minutes, the customer support representative found this web page which provides support information for the ze4501, which is almost identical to the custom built ze4500. The Product Specifications is the most informative document in the collection. None of these documents are very technical, so they are not super helpful, but the specification has some good hints for what Linux drivers will work. It also gave me enough information to buy my memory upgrade which is what I needed.

Written November 11, 2003

I think I found a solution to the sound problems. I haven’t looked into it enough, but it looks like a bug to me. I get sound as long as only the Master, Headphone, PCM, Line, and CD channels are unmuted. I’m not sure which of the other channels is causing the problem, or why. I haven’t tested the mic, but everything else I want seems to be working now (CDs, DVDs, MP3s, OGG, etc). I hope that this really is the problem, and it’s not just a temporary “I got lucky” streak of functioning sound. If I get the chance, I’ll have to experiment more and try to pin down which combination of channels, then I should examine the driver’s code, or at least file a bug report. For now, I’m going to wait and make sure that my sound really works consistently, and focus on more pressing projects.

Should it be helpful in the future, I just noticed that the kernel does in fact have drivers for this chipset (without ALSA). They are hidden near the bottom of the list and grouped with other drivers. The line reads “Trident 4DWave DX/NX, SiS 708 or ALi5451 PCI Audio Core drive”. Should my sound still not work consistently, I’ll have to try ditching ALSA and using this driver.

Summary: Herein the author documents his installation of Linux on his new laptop.

I bought an HP Pavilion ze4500 laptop this week. The ze4500 is the custom built model number of the ze series. I think that all ze series laptops use similar hardware. Here is my configuration:

• Intel Celeron Mobile 2.4 GHz
• 256 MB(1X256)DDR SDRAM
• 20 GB 4200 RPM Hard Drive
• 8X DVD Drive
• ALi Corporation Intel 537 56K Modem (built in)
• National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) 10/100 Ethernet (build in)
• 10/100 LAN
• 15.0” TFT SXGA+ (1400 x 1050)
• ATI Mobility Radeon 7000
• ALi Corporation USB 1.1
• Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 FireWire (IEEE 1394)
• ALi Corporation M5451 Audio Device
• Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller

I have tried two Linux distros on it, and have found both very satisfactory (so far). I have included more details below. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to give you all the details that I would like to share. For more information, check out TuxMobil.org.

Fedora

I installed the Fedora Core 1 beta (0.95 severn) and the installer took care of setting everything up right out of the box. There were a few tricks though:

• HP laptop keyboards are known to fail hardware detection. To have a usable keyboard, make sure to generate events (tap a key) while the installer kernel auto-detects your hardware. This means that you should tap the spacebar from the time the computer boots off the CD until the installer is completely loaded. Once the system is installed, this is no longer necessary.
• I had to append vga=795 to my kernel parameters in the boot loader to use the full screen with the virtual terminals.
• I had to append apm=no and acpi=force to my kernel parameters in the boot loader so that acpi would load.
• I had to manually add the resolution “1400x1050” to my mode list in XF86Config and remove all other resolutions to get X to use the whole screen.

I verified that these things worked before moving on to another distro:

• Sound
• X (though I didn’t test 3d acceleration)
• Ethernet
• CDROM abilities of the DVD
• ACPI—I could check battery life and capacity, but I couldn’t suspend
• Touchpad with scroll wheel area (it looks just like an Intellimouse to Linux)
• Fn Keys to change contrast on LCD
• DVD player

Written November 5, 2003

Gentoo

I have had a harder time getting things set up in Gentoo, mostly because I can’t find much good help on the web. Here are my hints:

• make.conf settings:
  • CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”
  • CFLAGS=”- O3 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe” [note: you’ll have to use pentium3 instead of pentium 4 to emerge OpenOffice.]
• Don’t use initrd to do hardware detection (genkernel’s default), or every time you boot you have to keep tapping the keyboard so that it gets detected. Instead, compile your own bzImage.
  • Update: initrd will correctly detect your keyboard if you disable “Legacy USB Support” in the BIOS. Once you get X running, you can turn legacy keyboard support back on, and each bootup when X starts it will reconfigure the keyboard correctly (works in the virtual terminals as well). Just remember to tap the keyboard if you have to turn X off on bootup for some reason.
• Don’t compile any support for pcmcia devices into you kernel. Instead, emerge pcmcia-cs and add it to the default run level.
• Emerge acpid and add it to the default run level.
• Add natsemi to you modules.autoload for onboard ethernet support.
• A link to my XF86Config. Beware, I don’t know much about configuring this.
• Use ALSA for the sound, driver = snd-ali5451.
• I used xbindkeys to get the volume up, volume down, and mute button (fn+backspace) working. I can’t get the mute button on the side of the laptop to generate any events.

I hope to get time to add the other things that I had to play with.

Written November 6, 2003