CompaqNw8440

please note that this was autoconverted from twiki format...i will beautify it soon

Installing Fedora Core 5 on a HP Compac nw8440 T2600

Hardware

<small>

• [ ] Did not check, yet

  Works out of the box [info] Works, but needed to tweak/install

%ICON{warning}% Does work partially

• Does not work at all

</small>

Preparation

the laptop came with a preinstalled Windows XP Pro and the 'HP Backup Manager' on a seperate partitions. I decided, that i will never use the backup manager and uninstalled it (which removed the extra partition). then i used PartitionMagic to resize the windows partition to 16gb.

Installation of Fedora Core 5

i decided to install FC5 because i already had it on my dell laptop and made good experience with it. i downloaded the latest FC5 (may 2006) DVD iso image and started the installation. i tried to select the very minimal set of packages, including KDE. i prefer to install additional packages whenever i need it.

Disk Layout

as always, i struggeled about the correct partition sizes and was almost tempted to use LVM. but since i wanted to be able to access the ext3 partitions from windows i decided not to do it, and rather have a large =/home= partition.

Post-Install

• after the installtion, i first ran 'yum upgrade' to get the latest stuff
• then i added more rpm repos to yum:

     cd /etc
     mv -f yum.conf yum.conf.bak
     wget http://www.fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf
     rpm -Uvh http://www.fedorafaq.org/yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm

• installed ntfs kernel module ntfs-kmod-common-2.1.27-1.lvn5

• added fstab entry for windows partition:
  • =/dev/sda1 /mnt/c ntfs gid=users,umask=002 0 0=

• removed graphical booter: rpm -e rhgb

• adjusted grup config for nice vga resolution:

  • title Fedora Core (2.6.17-1.2145_FC5smp)
            root (hd0,1)
            kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2145_FC5smp ro root=LABEL=/ vga=795 quiet
            initrd /initrd-2.6.17-1.2145_FC5smp.img

• removed old kernel: rpm -e kernel-smp-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5

[#ConfAti ]

ATI Mobility !FireGL V5200

until today, there is not specific driver from ati available. so i tried the generic fglrx driver:

• xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.26.18-1.lvn5

• kmod-fglrx-smp-8.26.18-1.2.6.17_1.2145_FC5

and modified xorg.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "fglrx"
        BoardName   "ATI Technologies Inc, FileGL v5200"
        ChipID      0x71c5
        BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

after restarting X, fgl_glxgears just runs fine:

$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Pentium 4 (SSE2) (FireGL) (GNU_ICD)
OpenGL version string: 2.0.5879 (8.26.18)
$ fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
2165 frames in 5.0 seconds = 433.000 FPS
2278 frames in 5.0 seconds = 455.600 FPS

UPDATE (Feb 9 2007): The official Linux drivers can be found at http://www.ati.com (direct link: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-firegl.html). Follow the instructions for Distro Specific or Default. To do Distro Specific you will need to pre-set your screen to at least 1024x768 or the [OK] button will be off your screen. Tested both installs many times with no problems.

Getting the nice fonts

• in order to get the nice fonts like in windows, i followed the steps described here: http://en.opensuse.org/Optimal_Use_of_Fonts_on_SuSE

• installed fonts from http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/files/msttcorefonts-1.3-4.noarch.rpm

• restart font server: sudo /etc/init.d/xfs restart

• regenerate font cache: sudo fc-cache -vf

• rebuild freetype library:
  1. download freetype.src.rpm

  2. extract the rpm with rpm -ivh freetype-2.1.4-5.src.rpm

  3. Move to =/usr/src/redhat/SPECS=, and open freetype.spec with your editor of choice.

  4. Change the 1 to a 0 in =%define without_bytecode_interpreter 1= and save.

  5. Build the rpm with rpmbuild -bb freetype.spec. Note that this depends on the XFree86-devel package, so install it if you get errors.

  6. Move to =/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/=. The packages should be there. Do a rpm -Uvh --force freetype-2.1.4-5.i386.rpm. I installed the devel package too, but I'm not sure if that's necessary.

• restart X
• use proper fonts in KDE (tahoma, courier new, disable antialias for range 0 - 15)

• adjusting the resolution of the screen in xorg.conf

  Section "Monitor"
    [...]
          DisplaySize  508 318
    [...]
  EndSection

• adjust the font-alias ordering in =/etc/fonts/fonts.conf= and move the microsoft ones (arial, verdana, courier new, times new roman) before the bitstream ones. this selects the nice fonts in the GTK apps.

[#ConfTouch ]

Touchpad

the default config in xorg.conf enables 3 button emulation. since my touchpad has 3 buttons, this can be disabled:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Synaptics"
        Driver      "synaptics"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
EndSection

#ConfWlan

Intel 3945ABG Wireless LAN controller

after installation, lspci shows:

10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 4222 (rev 02)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 135c

you can find the drivers here http://atrpms.net/dist/fc5/ipw3945. just enable the repository in yum, and install the ipw3945. After reboot, by card does not come up automatically. i have to explicitely remove and add the module.

#ConfFinger

Fingerprint Sensor

played around a bit with the instructions in http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader, but get errors:

Description: TouchChip TFM/ESS Fingerprint BSP
Vendor: UPEK, Inc.
Module ID: {5550454b2054464d2f45535320425350}
Device ID: 0x00000000
BioAPI_ModuleLoad failed, BioAPI Error Code: 6477 (0x194d)

#ConfKey

For the error message see http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader#Fedora_Core:

    If running ./Sample produces the error message 'BioAPI_ModuleLoad failed, BioAPI Error Code: 6477 (0x194d)' 
    then uncommenting the line 
    //BioAPI_SetGUICallbacks(gModuleHandle, NULL, NULL,TextGuiCallback, NULL); 
    in main.c can help.

Special Keys

The keys for changing the volume and muting the sound completely side don't work out of the box, but you can easily map them to any commands you want under X11, e.g.:

    xmodmap -e "keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume"
    xmodmap -e "keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume"
    xmodmap -e "keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute"

(this works at least under KDE). To make the settings permanent you need to save the map into some file:

    xmodmap -pke > ~/xmodmap.conf

and then read it back using

    xmodmap ~/xmodmap.conf

in some startup file. You can also put the codes to =/etc/X11/Xmodmap=

Needful Things

PPTP Client

Install PPTP and the pptpconfig GUI using the following commands:

[# rpm -Uvh http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/fc5/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm
]
[# yum --enablerepo=pptp-stable install pptpconfig ||]

Readers comment : TPM module

This laptop (at least mine) also has a TPM chip. Did you test it ?

xerces8