Compaq Presario V6000 series

[Shadwell]

I've been trying to get Ubuntu 6.06 AMD64 to run on this laptop, so far there have been a few problems, which I expected given that it's a recent model, so I'm hoping that some people here may be able to help.

For the people that have access to it, the HWDB ID is 88805ef8eaf5ae3040edde3b18f23956 - I'll attach lspci to the post.

Initial boot works but only with acpi=off specified.

Here are the problems...

1. The graphics card (NVidia GeForce GO 6150) does not work with the NVidia driver, the screen goes black and stays that way.

2. The graphics card does work with the Vesa driver, but will only display up to 1024x768, the LCD panel is a widescreen 1280x800, I can't see any way to get that resolution. I've tried several modelines that other people have posted on various forums, but no luck.

3. Wireless ethernet isn't detected, it's a broadcom though, so I expected that given their reputation.

4. The sound card is detected and listed as NVidia HD audio, however it doesn't actually work. XMMS complains that it can't access the device, and writing directly to /dev/dsp gives a write error.

Any help would be appreciated, especially with the graphics resolution.

[tdwester]

What broadcom series is it?

[Shadwell]

Originally Posted by tdwester What broadcom series is it?

The PCI vendor/product codes are 14e4:4311 - lspci lists it as
"Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)"

I guess Dell used the same chip in one of their laptops.

The webpage for the bcm43xx driver doesn't list that as a supported model,
but I tried it anyway, and it didn't work.

I've not tried ndiswrapper yet, but as soon as I find some XP64bit drivers
for the card I'll give it a go.

[boz]

I have the Compaq V6000z, with the AMD Sempron 32-bit variety. I've had no luck so far, but I have a few resources at the University I'm attending. Someone there might be able to figure it out. It boots up, but then it freezes at certain points and X-server fails to start, even with the Vesa driver. I haven't tried booting with acpi=off yet, that might help. And, of course, the Broadcom card is incompatible as always.

If anyone on my end can help with the video and wireless drivers, I'll be sure to document it and post it here.

[-TomcaT-]

Hiya. Well, I got one of these about a week or two ago... Here's what I've been able to find thus far (I've been running ubuntu and fedora core on the box):

1) Graphics drivers for this machine are a way off yet. There's a bug in the current nvidia drivers which won't be fixed until the 1-0.9xx series driver. This is from a thread in the nv forums, so the bad news is 3D is out until that version is released.

2) On a positive note though, the xorg nv driver works properly with the machine and you can get proper widescreen support. Just change the driver line to nv from vesa in the xorg config and you should be fine (this works on fedora, I haven't tested under ubuntu yet, but should be fine).

3) That's about where I got on the wireless. I opened up the mahcine and wrote down the broadcom chip ID and googled it back to the 1390 as well.

4) I can't get sound working either... It's detected, but not working. Grumble... I'm going to poke around on the nvidia forums some more.


There's several laptop models running around with this hardware configuration, so I'm hoping more attention will be paid to this hardware set in the near future. Hope the nv driver works out for you at least.

-TomcaT-

Side note: I'm running the v6000z series (AMD) model.

[-TomcaT-]

Grpahics driver update.... there is a beta release for the gfx drivers from nvidia: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=77021

Install doesn't work properly on fedora, but ubuntu might be fine (FC and nvidia installers never seem to get along well...)

I'm working on ndis wrappers for the wireless, so when I get that working, I'll post here.

-TomcaT-

[-TomcaT-]

Oi... So, sound, wireless, and other things are now working. First of all, setting acpi=off on this laptop will prevent a huge amount of things from working right, so find a way aorund it. Try playing with the various acpi flags (google them). As a side note, my machine will boot w/o themif rhgb is disabled (again, I'm running fedora, so if you can just get ubuntu to boot in a standard text mode, it might help...)

These are all running in x86_64 kernel...

So, sound support: If acpi=off is set, it will not work. Oterhwise it should be fine. I think running with acpi=noirq might work with sound ( alot of things started working, like power management, etc), so give this a shot. My laptop finnally booted w/o the acpi flag set (rhgb turned off), and that's when it finally went up.

Wireless support: This was done with ndiswrapper (see ndiswrapper on sourceforge). You will need a (very) recent version of ndiswrapper as well as the correct driver set for your card. In my case, finding the 64bit driver with support for this thing was a nightmare (4311 broadcom). In any case, I found a complete driver set that was packaged by compaq. It was found on www.station-drivers.com (use wine to extract the contents of the exe look for broadcom-wifi-4.40.exe). It's a huge DL, but it has support for 64 and 32bit w/ support for a lot of the broadcom cards). This will not work without acpi support fully up, so you can't use acpi=noirq or the driver will fail to load properly. Check dmesg output to see if the driver loaded properly.

If you need exact steps spelled out, let me know. Most of the stuff is worth digging into, so spend a good few hours on google and you'll learn some things. For those not familiar with wirelss on linux, Use the "iwlist scanning" to harvest network info (that's on FC anyway)...

Folks will want to chime in with distro specific info here though...

-TomcaT-

[-TomcaT-]

Well, the "I can't boot" problem is still present when trying to boot w/o ACPI settings... Somehow my laptop must have gotten into an odd state where it'd boot properly last night (I rebooted several times so maybe the difference between last night and today is the cold boot...)

In any case, I'll work on figuring out what conditions will allowed the machine to work, but this is the first time I've seen it (or heard of it) up w/ sound and all...

-TomcaT-

[-TomcaT-]

So, today with many attempts, I got the machine to boot successfully once, and only once... There's some kind of weir race condition that just deadlocks everyhing, and I'm not seeing anyhing in /var/log/messages even when running verbose... So, it looks like it's a timing issue, although I've no clue how to work around it... Anyone have an idea about mucking with bios setttings on this machine? The default menus are, well, devoid of any meaningful options... Any ideas?

-TomcaT-

[-TomcaT-]

Ok, I can get the machine to boot fairly regularly (i.e. not hang) by doing the following:

- disable the rhgb setting (graphical boot). Text boot seems to crash less, so it might be worthwhile to see if ubuntu can do the same.

- add the following kernel parameter to grub: "pci=assign-bus" I also added "verbose" to see if any errors were being logged that would lend a clue as to what was going on.

- Switch back to vesa drivers for the GFX. A post on a different forum (nvnews I think) said that for some reason the memory being reserved for the gfx card out of main system mem was being accessed which was a contributing factor of the crashes (which would explain the crashes during X initialization).

Leaving ACPI on, this will usually boot up for me (I do have ndis wrappers installed), so the machine boots up into a wireless ready box. This is _not_ a solution to the issue, but it is a work around. I think there's two factors here, one being the nv driver and two either a BIOS or kernel bug contributing to the problem. I'm not smart enough to track it down though But at least there's a work around...

-TomcaT-