Fedora 7 on HP Pavilion DV9000 (dv9375eu)
Last changes: 06.09.2007
If one has any further questions about this machine or its configuration, I will try to answer them. Please take into consideration that it is not my notebook I'm describing here. I only make the technical support for it. If I have to try something out on it, it can take a week or two. I cannot guarantee, that my answers will solve any of your problems 
. My email adress is adalbert.prokop@gmx.de.
Please note that I'm not a native speaker. If my english sounds wooden or funny - amuse youself as much as you like and send me a note how to fix it later on. ;-)
You can have a look on this Notebook on the HP homepage.
- Overview
- Hardware
- Linux installation
- Suspend-to-disk
- Caveats with a 64-bit system
- Remarks
- System overview
- Photographs
Overview
Following measures are given: 28.50×39.60×3.16 cm. They correspond to 11.22×15.59×1.24 inches. The weight is 3.56 kg (7.85 pounds).
The notebook has a silver chassis with a black lid, a 17" WXGA display (1440×900 pixel) and a touchpad with a separated area for scroll wheel ersatz. Over the touchpad there is a button, which switches the touchpad on and off. On the front edge there is a switch controlling wireless communication (wifi and bluetooth), audio connectors for microphone, earphones and SPDIF aside with a infrared receiver. It has two loudspeakers. Above the keyboard there is a panel with various multimedia touch-buttons. On the upper edge of the display there is an integrated webcam (1.3 Megapixel) and the internal microphone (two small holes, for the left and right channel). The keyboard is full-sized, even with a separate number block. To the left from the caps-lock key and above the num-lock key there are LED showing the keys' state. On the left side of the front edge there are 3 LED showing the state of the power supply, battery charging and hard drive activity.
You will find a more precise description of the available connectors below.
Because of its dimensions and weight this notebook is not suitable for mobile working. The bottom becomes very warm. It is mainly a desktop replacement rather than a mobile companion. You should pay attention to keep sufficient distance to the tabletop, allowing the fan to transport enough air to cool the CPU. A tablecloth succesfully covers the ventilation and so is responsible for ongoing fan noise.
The 64-bit architecture causes trouble time and time again, though it is not the hardware's fault. Some software is not available for 64-bit systems, e.g. Adobe's flash player or Sun's Java browser plugin. You have to do some magic here.
Hardware
| Typy | HP Pavilion DV 9000 (dv9375eu) |
| CPU | AMD Turion X2 Mobile dual core (64bit), 2GHz, 4024.44 BogoMIPS |
| BIOS | Phoenix BIOS F.36 |
| Chipset | nVidia C51/MCP51 (PCI express) |
| Cache | 512KB second level cache |
| Memory | 2 GB (dedicated) |
| Display | 17" WXGA 1440×900 pixel |
| Video card | NVidia GeForce™ Go 7600 |
| WLAN | Broadcom BCM4310 IEEE 802.11 a/b/g |
| Audio | nVidia MCP51 |
| Media | 2×160 GB hard drive (Seagate ST9160821AS), 5400 RPM Samsung TS-L632M CD-RW/DVD-W SD/MMC/MS/SM card reader (Ricoh R5C822, works with Linux!) |
| Interfaces |
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Linux installation
Distribution
I have installed Fedora 7 for x86_64 architecture and use the default Fedora kernel. The installation of the i386 version for 32 bit would not even start. The installation went without problems, but the booting of the freshly installed system was a little bit tricky. You should add additional kernel options during the installation which are noapic irqfixup. Without noapic the system freezes after a while. Without irqfixup after some time there was an entry in the system log about a not catched interrupt 7 which became turned off. Afterwards the USB hard drives ceased to work.
Graphics
The proprietary video driver from NVidia works and can be easily installed. This driver can be downloaded from the NVidia homepage. Be careful to choose the x86_64 (AMD64) version.
If you forget to use the noapic kernel option your system will freeze not later than on starting the X server.
Here is my xorg.conf if someone needs one.
Sound
It beeps and does a lot of fuss. In other words: it works. The driver responsible for the sound is snd-hda-intel.
It did not any quality test with the built-in microphone or an external one. I simply hope, they work as well as the external speakers and the earphones do.
Ethernet
The forcedeth module does the work here.
WLAN
There is a native driver for Broadcom's chipsets, which is part of Fedora's kernel under the name bcm43xx_mac80211. This driver currently supports only the b/g standards. Unfortunelly the driver alone is useless, it still needs a firmware which has to be extracted from a windows driver. The extracting tool is also present in Fedora, its name is bcm43xx-fwcutter. In my case it could not extract the firmware from a Vista driver, I had to download a XP driver, but it was not easy to find one. Broadcom itself does not provide drivers, so you have to download it from your notebook manufacturer's (HP) homepage.
Once extracted, copy the firmware to /lib/firmware.
The first impression was disillusioning. Wifi works, scanning for WLANs is possible. But the connection was "shaky" - on the way from the notebook to the access point two meters away about every eighth ping packet got lost. TCP connections also had clear fluctuations, which I never saw with other notebooks in the same environment. But there is still hope because the driver is under heavy development.
Modem
Chances are that there are Linux drivers for the modem chipset. In lack of real need, I never tried to find them. Have a look at http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/, which is a prominent site for drivers and information for on winmodems on linux.
Hotkeys
These buttons can be used with Linux. Some of the keys initially produce only scancodes, which are not recognized by the kernel and reported in the syslog. To use those keys you have to associate those scancodes to some keycodes. The easiest way to do it is to put the following lines into /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
setkeycodes e008 226 # KEY_MEDIA (Quickplay) X: 237 setkeycodes e00e 207 # KEY_PLAY (DVD) X: 179 setkeycodes e031 138 # KEY_HELP (Fn-F1, help) X: 235 setkeycodes e00a 152 # KEY_LOCK (Fn-F6, lock) X: 146
Once active, you have to make those keys usable with X, because even if they are recognised, they do not do anything useful. The project Linux support for Easy Access and Internet Keyboards forged lineakd, which waits for those keycodes and can launch some programs, depending on your configuration. My configuration files look like this: lineakd.conf and lineakkb.def. For Fedora there are lineak packages ready, you only need these config files.
FireWire
Cannot test it, because I've got no devices...
USB
High speed USB, working out of the box. Use irqfixup as kernel option!
External display
Not tested.
S-Video
Not tested.
The S-Video adaptor is not compatible with the common composite cinch adaptor! S-Video transfers luminosity (brightness) and chrominance (color intensity) seperately. A composite signal is composed of both pieces of information. Most adaptors from S-Video to cinch use the luminosity and leave chroma unused. The result is an black'n'white image. Unfortunately, one can't simply connect luminosity and chrominance, that would result in a short-circuit.
If you don't want to spend money for a prefabricated S-Video to composite adapter, ask Google for the cable FAQ. There you can find a manual for a self made adapter.
Suspend-to-disk
Not tested because it is not my laptop and I never have it long enough for such exhaustive testing.
Caveats with a 64-bit system
There is no problem if you only use software coming from Fedora's repositories. Also OS software in most cases is trouble-free. But things get complicated once you deal with precompiled software which is not available for x86_64 architecture. This is almost always the case with Firefox's plugins. Fedora installs the 32-bit version of Firefox along with its 64-bit sibling, but per default the latter one is started. You have to edit the start script to change this behaviour and apply the changes again in the case Firefox is updated.
Another solution is the nspluginwrapper which wraps 32-bit plugins and makes the usable in a 64-bit environment. I successfully tried it with the latest flash plugin and Adobe's Acrobat Reader plugin.
But it still does not help with Java. Sun indeed has declared Java open source, but there is no official release yet. Sun does provide a x86_64 version of Java, but it has no browser plugin. The only way out is Java from Blackdown, currently in the version 1.4.2 (Java 2). They are working on Java 1.5 (Java 5). You can get it from one of the FTP mirrors.
But still it did not work for me, e.g. with www.map24.de, and let my firefox crash. So I decided to use the 32-bit version to avoid those problems.
I have built a RPM package which patches the Firefox's start script on every update and lets the user decide, which version he wants to use. The package and the description are available on linux tool page.
Remarks
This notebook is a desktop which has been pressed into a smaller case. Not suitable for mobile use, but very nice for home use. Here you can take advantage of the big keyboard with separate number block and excellent typing sensation.
The display has no anti-reflecting surface, only a glass pane. The colours are more intense but the background cleary reflects in the display. Working with a window in your back is not recommendable.
Beacause of the 64-bit CPU you should be prepared for some trouble. Software from Fedora's repositories is problem-free, but other precompiled software for this architecture is rare. Fortunatelly you can also use 32-bit software if you have this version of the system libraries installed. Both version can coexist.
Photographs
 left side (click to enlarge) |
 right side (click to enlarge) |
 front side (click to enlarge) |
 bottom (click to enlarge) |
 front edge (click to enlarge) |
- S-Video
- VGA
- HP expansion port
- LAN port
- Modem port
- HDMI
- USB
- USB
- FireWire
- MMC/SD card reader
- USB
- HP expansion port
- CD/DVD drive
- USB
- Power connector
- Left microphone input
- Webcam (1.3 megapixel)
- Right microphone input
- Battery bay
- Battedy bay lock
- Ventilation grid
- 2nd hard drive
- Memory
- 1st hard drive
- WLAN/Bluetooth switch
- Infrared port
- Microphone
- Earphones
- SPDIF
Last change on: Sunday, 17. April 2011, 20:11:13