CentOS 5 on an HP ZV6015 Laptop

In the spring of 2005 my employer decided to relocate our offices from a location that wasn't that bad of a commute for me to one that was. Luckily, Denver had been building a light rail system that came fairly close to my commuting needs for the new location. I like to drive on an open road or even on not that much of a road but I hate to drive in urban, congested traffic so it looked like I'd be spending about an hour and a half each day sitting on a light rail train. I decided to buy a laptop with the hope that I would be able to get some work done during my commute. After shopping around a little I settled on an HP zv6015us that was currently on sale since it came with 1GB of RAM and a 64 bit AMD CPU.

Of course the system came pre-loaded with Windows XP Home Edition which I was only able to tolerate for about a day or two. Plus, the version of XP home was only the 32 bit version and I had a 64 bit CPU that I wanted to take full advantage of. This was right about the time Fedora Core 4 was in final release testing so that was my first attempt to get Linux onto my laptop. After several tries with FC4 release candidates and briefly with Gentoo I finally settled back to FC4. The worst problem was the install since I didn't know about the nofb trick to turn off use of the frame buffer. I ended up connecting a spare monitor to the external video port for the install.

Once past the hurdle of getting any form of Linux installed I was set. The basics all worked (CD/DVD drive, touchpad, USB, sound, etc.) and I didn't have a need for the media card reader at that time. The wireless was problematic but I eventually got the internal wireless (Broadcom BCM4306) working with ndiswrapper. The only major functionality that didn't work was suspend in any form.

I put up with the quick EOL for Fedora with the move from FC4 to FC5 but I was tired of it by the time FC6 was scheduled to come out plus it looked like RHEL5 and thus CentOS5 would have nearly the same functionality and seven years of support. By this time installation was a piece of cake. I just dropped the first CD in the drive and pointed the installer at a local ftp server drive that had the remaining CD images. I still ran into problems with the native bcm43xx driver since it didn't want to authenticate to my wireless access point. It would connect with no problems if I turned off authentication at the WAP (an unacceptable solution) and the laptop would connect with no problems with WEP, WPA-PSK or WPA-radius using ndiswrapper. So, I'm still using ndiswrapper.

By this time I also had a new digital camera that used secure digital (SD) memory so now I had a use for the card reader. A quick checked showed that inserting a SD card was recognized at some low level bu I couldn't access the card. I pulled down the latest kernel source from kernel.org and built it (make oldconfig using the CentOS config file in /boot and generally accepting the defaults for new features). This let me actually use the media reader and wasn't too big of a hassle. At some point the SD reader code was backported or debugged and the card reader started working with stock kernels from CentOS.

At this point everything works although I'm still using ndiswrapper for the wireless connection. At some point I'll give the bcm43xx module another go to see if it will both connect and authenticate with my WAP. Here's the output from lspci for the gory details of exactly what is in the laptop:

[root@spindle ~]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:04.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc SB400 AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)
03:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
03:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
03:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller
03:04.3 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Integrated FlashMedia Controller
03:04.4 Class 0805: Texas Instruments PCI6411/6421/6611/6621/7411/7421/7611/7621 Secure Digital Controller
03:06.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

cat /proc/cpuinfo gives:

[root@spindle ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 15
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 1000.000
cache size : 512 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow up
bogomips : 1995.44
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp

The system is set up to dual boot to either XP or CentOS 5.1 x86_64. XP is relegated to a 20GB partition and I set up a 2GB vfat partition to make sure I could pass things back and forth between XP and Linux if the need ever arose. The remaining 78GB of the internal disk is all Linux. I will also add that the upgrade from CentOS 5 to 5.1 only took running "yum update."

As it turns out, I never did do any real work on the laptop during my commute. I did end up using the laptop for venting quite a bit of my frustrations with my old employer's ideas on developing software into what became a very early draft for my book, A New Chore for Sisyphus.

Cheers,
Dave