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updated Jan. 22 2007: Added info an hibernateThe system tested is mostly a bare-bones HP Compaq Business Notebook nx6110 configuration PR124UA#ABA.
The specifics of my system are:
Here's what works, what doesn't, and what I haven't tested as of my last update (see above for last update date):
| Feature | Status | Configuration Work Necessary |
|---|---|---|
| video : basic X display | |
|
| video : 3D acceleration | |
|
| video : xv acceleration | |
|
| video : external monitor control | |
|
| audio | |
|
| CD/DVD/ROM | |
|
| 10/100 onboard ethernet | |
|
| wireless : WiFi | |
|
| wireless : infrared | |
|
| modem | |
|
| touchpad | |
|
| USB | |
|
| firewire | |
|
| PCMCIA : basic functionality | |
|
| PCMCIA : hotplug event notification | |
|
| Suspend : to RAM | |
|
| Suspend : to disk | |
Any standard Fedora Core 6 install method should work fine.
I recommend disabling SELinux. One day it will hopefully be a transparent feature when enabled, but at present it can and does cause problems with some software.
In order to load packages that support the wireless (and for other good reasons), you must enable the livna repository. Until the setup notes at fedorafaq.org come up to FC6, you can accomplish this by running as root:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
The linux i810 driver is correctly chosen upon FC6 install, and the screen resolution and type are auto-detected.
The video hotkey (Fn+F4) works to switch between LCD and external displays. It toggles between LCD only, both LCD and external displays, and external only. It only functions when a monitor is plugged into the external video port.
When the lid is closed and the lid switch activates, the video display turns off, and when it opens, it turns back on once you do some activity (like moving the mouse). Seems reasonable to me. If you want it to do other things, I've read that there are ways to get these events from acpid and attach your own actions.
The audio works fine by default.
The onboard ethernet works fine by default.
For those looking for an alternative driver, the broadcom provided driver (gpl) for the bcm4400 is available, but I haven't tried it.
Warning: the HP BIOS locks out non-HP mini-PCI cards, so don't expect a non-HP mini-PCI card to work. Someone claims there is a workaround.
I use the Intel Pro Wireless 2200 card that I bought separately from HP. The driver for the ipw2200 in FC6 is version 1.1.2 which seems to work fine. To use it, just run as root yum install ipw2200-firmware to get the firmware from livna. Then run System -> Administration -> Network, in the "Hardware" tab make sure the "Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless" is listed as device of type "Wireless". If Fedora doesn't recognize it as type "Wireless", a reboot will fix it. Then, create a new device that uses it in the "Devices" tab.
The blue wireless radio LED won't come on for the ipw2200 unless you put the line:
options ipw2200 led=1
into /etc/modprobe.conf.
Once the wireless device is working properly, I recommend using the Network Manager with it. This automatically detects and re-connects to the best network connection available. To start using it, run as root:
/sbin/chkconfig NetworkManager on
/sbin/chkconfig NetworkManagerDispatcher on
/sbin/service NetworkManager start
/sbin/service NetworkManagerDispatcher start
Then, assuming you have a Notification Area somewhere in your Gnome panels, you will see the NetworkManager come up and start trying to make connections. You will need to supply network keys for encrypted wireless networks, and give a password for the keyring in which to store these keys. It seems to work pretty well, and Fedora 6 even supplies the necessary hooks to deal with suspend/resume.
If you want to or need to use the Broadcom wireless card, you have two options. First is to use the ndiswrapper software, which is the older and more tested but less functional way of doing it. The other way is to try the new native driver by looking here. I haven't tried the new native driver yet, so I only supply directions for the ndiswrapper method. Here are the steps to setting up ndiswrapper for the Broadcom card:
Now you can reboot to have it activate, or you can run depmod -a followed by modprobe ndiswrapper if you want to get it running immediately. Use the System -> Administration -> Network application to create a new device for the wlan0 ndiswrapper device.
This driver appears to be fairly stable, and able to do large volume transfers with no trouble. It even makes the blue wireless LED work. But, do NOT press the button containing the blue wireless LED. For me it works once or twice, but I always get a kernel crash shortly after doing it.
The synaptics touchpad works fine by default in FC6, but I find the use of tap-to-click awkward and error-prone. I put the line
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"between the
Section "InputDevice"for the Synaptics device and the subsequent
EndSectionin the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
By default the right side of the pad does vertical scrollwheel action, and the bottom edge of the pad does horizontal scrollwheel action. I found that the horizontal scroll in firefox took me forward and back whole pages, which was disconcerting, so I changed firefox to turn it into a true horizontal scroll by doing the following. First, bring up firefox, and visit about:config. Now right click on mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action and set it to 0.
If you really want to get fancy with the Synaptics touchpad configuration, look at the synclient command.
PCMCIA cards seem to work fine. There used to be a problem where they don't mount themselves automatically or bring up an icon on the desktop the way that USB drives do. If this is a problem for you, look at my notes for the nx6110 under Fedora 4. (I haven't tested this approach under Fedora 5 or 6, but it will probably work).
The good news is that suspend to RAM and disk work right out of the box.
You can try suspend to RAM by pressing the Fn+F3 (moon) key. When you do so, the system suspends in about 5 seconds, and the power LEDs blink slowly. In this low power state, I find that my nx6110 drains about 1.5% of the standard internal battery per hour. To bring it out of suspend, just press the power button, and in about 10 seconds you will be right where you were when you suspended.
Everything appears to survive just fine through a suspend/resume, including the ethernet, wireless, display, and sound. However, unless you are running the NetworkManager, you will have to manually shutdown and startup your network interfaces after a suspend. For this reason, I highly recommend using the NetworkManager.
If you do use NetworkManager, however, it sometimes (about 20% of the time to my observation) doesn't come back up properly after a suspend/restore. To fix this, you can replace the /etc/pm/hooks/10NetworkManager file with my modified version here. It does a full service shutdown on suspend and full service startup on restore, as opposed to the dbus-message based soft-stop that Fedora ships with. I really don't know why Fedora chooses this; the full service shutdown and restore works just fine and doesn't take noticably more time.
If you use NFS automounting, you may want to put my 60network file into /etc/pm/hooks. This stops any automount mount points upon suspend, and re-starts the automounter on resume. Without this, I used to notice various NFS hangs and other unpleasantness. However, it is possible with FC6 that this is no longer necessary.
I haven't tried keeping a USB or PCMCIA device attached through a suspend cycle. The suspend documentation says that you shouldn't change any peripherals (even batteries) while the machine is suspended.
Even suspend-to-disk (hibernate) works! Select it from the power management menu, and the current state gets saved to disk (the swap partition, I guess) and the machine powers off fully. On pressing the power button, it reboots, but after loading the kernel it sees the saved state and loads it up. I don't use suspend-to-disk much, so I don't have any tips or gotchas for it (maybe none are needed).
The following links I've found helpful in nx6110 configuration.
Other user experiences with the nx6110:
Info about suspend/hibernate:
HP linux support forums:
Linux on Laptop Sites:
I welcome corrections and additions to this page. You can email me at my email address soup at my company email domain ampersand.com.