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HP Pavilion zd7000
Introduction
This is a guide to running Linux with the HP Pavilion zd7000 laptop.
This guide is intended to provide you details on how well this laptop works with Linux and which modules you need to configure. For details on how to actually install and configure the required modules have a look at our guides section for distribution specific instructions.
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!Specification
| Name | HP Pavilion zd7000 |
| Processor | Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz |
| Screen | 17” WXGA+ |
| RAM | 1GB |
| HDD | 80GB |
| Optical Drive | DVD+-RW |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce Go 5600 |
| Network | 10/100 Ethernet, Broadcom BCM4306 802.11g Wireless |
| Other | 4 x USB2.0, 1 x Firewire |
Linux Compatibility
| Device | Compatibility | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Yes | |
| Screen | Yes | |
| Optical Drive | Yes | |
| Graphics | Yes | |
| Sound | Yes | Use the snd-intel8x0 module |
| Ethernet | Yes | |
| Wireless | Yes | |
| 56K Modem | Not Tested | |
| USB | Yes | |
| Firewire | Not Tested | |
| Card Reader | Not Tested | |
| PCMCIA | Not Tested |
Notes
For the graphics chip you can use either the open source 'nv' module or NVIDIA's proprietary 'nvidia' module. For installation instructions, you can view our Configuring a nVidia graphics chip guide. For 3D support, you will need the proprietary module.
This wireless controller in this laptop does not have any native drivers for Linux so you will need to use the ndiswrapper module. For installation instructions, you can view our Configuring the ndiswrapper module guide. The windows driver to use with ndiswrapper can be found here. There are some experimental modules available for this card which are available here. At this time these drivers are still under development and may not be totally stable.
Summary
The main issue with this laptop was the configuration of the wireless controller. Other than that there were no problems in getting this laptop working when used with an up to date Linux distribution. It is recommended to use a Linux distribution with kernel version 2.6.16 or greater, such as Fedora Core 5 or Ubuntu 6.06.
Discussion
Currently, this laptop has the OpenSuse 11.0 installed.
Installing 10.3, then later 11.0 was very easy and streight forward. No issues, error messages, or problems navigating around the KDE desktop 3.5 or 4.04. I played with the 10.3 version for about six months till the new version of OpenSuse 11 came around. The 10.3 version was setup with a MS Windows XP SP1 partition. Later I got rid of MS and reformmated HD ALL for OpenSuse 11.0. Now, I can play DVD movies, sound is great, LAN is very easy, CUPS is also very easy to setup,
The only headache I had was finding the correct documentation for installing ndiswrapper under this distribution and a Broadcom chipset which in itself is a major issue. Which I can say I found in this website.