Debian Lenny on amd64 HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea)

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Saturday, January 19. 2008

Posted by Neil Williams

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Debian Lenny on amd64 HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea)

Working!

I've decided to replace the previous post rather than leave it in place when there is a solution available.

Fixing the problem

I've been considering a new laptop for weeks - mainly to get more RAM, more space but without adding to the actual size of the machine (or weight). I know, I should have taken more time over the selection, I should have found out more about the hardware, etc.etc.
I've ended up with an HP Pavilion dv6000 (dv6615ea) for the 2Gb RAM, 15inch screen, 250Gb hard drive to replace my ageing iBook 12inch with 128Mb RAM and 30Gb hard drive - all for barely an inch extra depth and very similar weight (and it was cheaper than the original price of the iBook). I thought I'd made a good choice. Yes, it was "NVidia Graphics" according to the sticker and yes, I could have spent more time (and money) finding a pre-installed lappy but I was hasty. (Much the same way as you should never go food shopping whilst hungry). I've managed with NVidia graphics before without using the horrid proprietary rubbish and I was prepared to put up with less-than-perfect graphics (I never use 3D anyway) because the free driver is at least stable with the graphics that I actually need.

Updated

The ethernet card is not recognised by the Debian Etch installer - after a comment placed on this blog after my original post, I tried the Lenny installer for amd64 with signficant success. Selecting the vesa driver for the graphics provided a usable X setup (1024x768). I've still spent a lot more time on this than it should really have required but I do now have a genuine amd64 Debian installation with GNOME. The only thing not working is wireless (oh and sound). The wireless appears to be a bcm43xx issue - the driver appears to let the card work (the orange light turns blue) and the device is created but scanning fails.
I'm probably still going to have to leave this new lappy behind and take my existing iBook to Fosdem in a few weeks, but I'm now happier with HP in general.
I'll try to post a longer review somewhere soon.
So, thanks for the tip, Julian!

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i've got a dv6248eu running Sidux and everything works great...except wireless. i got it working but it crapped out last month (there's a forum at hp.com where many many are discussing the failing wireless on the 6000 machines). i ended up using Nvidia's drivers for X because i got much better performance.

i'll check my wireless setup (for the internal) and let ya know.

daniel

#1 daniel (Homepage) on 2008-01-19 22:12

I refuse to use ndiswrapper. It's bad enough having non-free firmware hanging around. Ubuntus Restricted Drivers are restricted for good reasons. I'd rather find a PCMCIA wireless card than use ndiswrapper to import yet more proprietary crap into the system.

#1.1 Neil Williams (Homepage) on 2008-01-19 23:57

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on HP dv6513eg and had the same problem with wireless. After some searching I found this tutorial: http://invaleed.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/install-bcm94311mcg-wlan-mini-pci-ubuntu-710/

hopefully it helps you too...

nodge

#2 nodge (Homepage) on 2008-01-19 23:29

here is where i found the link to set up my wireless: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=405990

#3 daniel (Homepage) on 2008-01-19 23:37

The 2.6.24 release candidates include a newer Broadcom driver named b43 which has gotten most of the development attention for several months now. I wasn't able to ever get my wireless (a broadcom 4318) to work reliably with bcm43xx, but it works great with b43.

bcm43xx is deprecated.

#4 Ken Bloom (Homepage) on 2008-01-20 00:42

bcm43xx may be deprecated but neither b43 nor b43legacy actually work under 2.6.24-1. It isn't a WPA issue, it affects *both* laptops with different symptoms. One can see the AP, one cannot. The b43foo wrapper *still* needs proprietary firmware but instead of using bcm43-fwcutter, users have to go and compile the cutter, work out which to download and then install it. After all that, no connection is possible.

#4.1 Neil Williams (Homepage) on 2008-01-30 19:59

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