This guide is intended to provide you details on how well this laptop works with Linux and which drivers you need to configure. For details on how to actually install and configure the required drivers have a look at our guides section for distribution specific instructions.

Page Contents Authors Introduction Specifications Linux Compatibility Notes Related Resources Summary

If you are looking to purchase this laptop you can visit HP's Pavilion notebook page.

Authors

"bluelinx" ("seuchenamtataon.at")
You can bug me on icq (151735781) or AIM (seuchenamt)

Introduction

This is a guide to running Linux with the HP Pavilion dv5000z series (dv5053EA Austrian Edition) laptop. This laptop was tested with FC6/i386.

Specifications

Processor	AMD Turion64
Screen	1280*800
RAM	1024MB
HDD	80 GB
Optical Drive	Dual-Format-DVD-Burner (+/-R +/-RW) with double-layer-support
Graphics	ATI RADEON® XPRESS 200M IGP-Graphik 128 MB could be sized up to 256 MB with RAM (Bios settings)
Network	10/100 LAN Ethernet onboard; 54mbit 802.11b/g WLAN
Other	Altec Lansing® speaker, touchpad with dedicated scrollpad, 101 standard keyboard support, 1 PCMCIA Slot with typ 1 or 2, 1 Expresscard/54(also Expresscard/34),3xUsb 2.0, 1xVga, 1x IEE1394, s-video, RJ11 Modem, Expansion Port and the normal sound outputs

Linux Compatibility

Device	Compatibility	Comments
Processor	ok	works really good also in battery mode
Screen	ok	Screen runs good, no problems
Optical Drive	ok	CD Burning works on K3b
Graphics	ok	the driver installation was more than problematic
Sound	ok	no problems works fine
Ethernet	ok	works fine
Wireless	ok	well the bcm43xx not good / ndiswrapper perfect
Bluetooth	n/a	n/a
56K Modem	ok	works well
USB	ok	works great
Firewire	ok	no problems with firewire
SD Card Reader	ok	works without any problems
PCMCIA	ok	tested network card works perfect

Notes

My laptop runs on Fedora Core 6 x86. Well i tried to install the 64 bit version it should also work but as the 64 bit version takes more time because mostly very often libraries have to be copied from usr/lib to usr/lib64 or linked, I`ve just started running the i386 version.

As i said Fedora Core 6 works good. Well after the installation everything was ok. The problem were two things, the first one was setting up wireless and the second one was ati driver (which one basic radeon Opensource Driver or Propiertry Driver from ATI Homepage). Fedora 6 comes up automaticly with the wireless driver bcm43xx installed in this laptop, the chipset is an Broadcom 4318 wireless called airforce 54. The only thing you have to do is download via yum the bcmfwcutter tool and the windows driver so that the tool can extract the firmware files out of the windows driver into your /usr/lib/firmware directory then the driver works. BUT the driver only works when there`s not many other different wireless networks around you.
In my case it worked about 1 year good and then nothing. As this card acts in lower radio modes it does not work or neither can`t connect properly if there are other wireless networks round you.
Therefore you have to get the ndiswrapper which can also be downloaded via yum. ndiswrapper works great, but you have to deinstall the bcm43xx driver completely. Just setting it on the kernels blacklist so that it does not get loaded was in my case not enough.
Also if you have any keys or wep activated on your Access Point set the key hexadecimal in some cases also mine the wireless key s:xxxxx does not work. Then i got an startup failure.

After this long procedure I can say my wireless works perfect.

The second problem was my ATI Driver Xpress200m is a rather bad chipset as it even does not work properly under Windows.
Fedora installs basically the open source radeon driver which works ok, but no direct rendering (DRI) is POSSIBLE, apps which use dri are very very very slow.
In the bios you can activate graphic sharing so you can give from your 1024 mb of RAM 128 to the graphic card so you have a total of 256 mb running on your graphic card.
Also at this time you cannot run AIGLX them nice wobbely effects with open source driver which runs only when DRI is enabled.
When you install the official ati driver then you can build out of the driver the fedora packages. it builds 5 rpm files these have to be installed then just type aticonfig --initial and strg+alt+backspace or restart your machine and your ati driver should load. Then you can try running via console fgl_glxgears and if you see a spinning cube with textures your systems runs fine with the new driver.
In my case i had a white cube with nothing. I just enabled sideport sharing in bios and now everything works perfect. And now if you still want wobbely effects this driver does not support AIGLX at this time but XGL runs fine. I haven`t tried it because I`m an X fan. But via certain search machines you can look for xgl + Fedora 6 howtos.

The keyboard was changed through the kde control center keyboard layout to:
HP Sk2505 Internet keyboard.
Now also 3 of the 5 buttons work. The dvd and the backwards button still have no function but power off and loudness works fine.

Related Resources

Preparing your laptop for Linux
Configuring a nVidia graphics chip
Increasing battery life

Summary

Well I have to say after solving all these problems I can say runs great and stable. It costs some time but its worth it all.



Have you installed Linux on this laptop? If so how about leaving a comment about your success in the comments section below.