I bought a new laptop for work (an HP dv9210us). It came with Windows Vista, which I thought was pretty nasty, so I decided to install Linux on it. (I run Kubuntu on my desktop, which is a great operating system after a minimal amount of post-install setup.)
- Kubuntu - I put my Kubuntu livecd into the cdrom drive, and rebooted. It locked up half way through the boot sequence. I tried various boot options (turning off ACPI, etc) but nothing made a difference. I don’t really know what the issue is, but I found it in several of the other distros that I tried, and undoubtedly has something to do with new hardware that isn’t yet fully supported in all kernels, or something. Anyway, I filed a bug.
- Mepis - I tried Mepis. Same deal as above, which is no surprise, as it’s based on Kubuntu. I was hoping that they’d fixed whatever problem I encountered above.
- Knoppix - I downloaded and booted the latest Knoppix livecd. It booted flawlessly, although it really is ugly as sin. I installed it to the hard drive, installed the wireless driver from Dell (using ndiswrapper), installed the NVidia proprietary driver, and started customizing KDE. But then, halfway through my trawl down the list of installed packages in Synaptic to find things that I could uninstall (since Knoppix comes with everything including the kitchen sink, to the point of overwhelming the usefulness of the application menu,) I thought “this is way too much work; let’s try some other distros.” So, onwards.
- Kanotix - This is based on Knoppix. It booted, but it’s uglier than Knoppix by default, and has just as many useless programs that I’d have to uninstall.
- Mandriva - I used to use Mandrake, after I ditched Red Hat and Fedora, and then grew to hate it. I haven’t used it since they merged with Connectiva, so figured it would be worth a shot. It wasn’t. It wouldn’t boot.
- PCLinuxOS - OMFGIH! I had heard mixed things about this distro, but figured it was worth trying. Unfortunately they only have a beta for download on their site at the moment, and the beta-ness shines through. It booted, it installed, and it was beautiful - I mean beautiful - but it kept hard locking after about 20 minutes. I disabled ACPI, and that made the system totally unstable. Also, there were a few quirks in the UI config tools (although the UI config tools are a wonderful thing, originally written by Mandrake). Because of the lockups, I gave up on it, but I will be checking it out again in the future. It’s a potential Ubuntu beater.
- Freespire - This is billed as “linux for n00bs” (it’s the free alternative to Linspire). It booted (took forever) and then loaded a fairly uninspiring KDE desktop. Some strange choices; JACK is the default sound system, which was unable to detect my sound card. There aren’t any UI config tools aside from standard KDE ones. CNR is nice though, and is well integrated (appearing at the bottom of every submenu in the applications menu); looking forward to seeing it in Kubuntu. Moving on…
- Sabayon - this I have hopes for. It’s based on Gentoo, and seems to be billed as “Gentoo for non-masochists”. Downloading right now, let’s see how it works.
- Fedora Core 6 - I didn’t like Fedora last time I tried it, quickly finding myself in RPM hell. However, just because ESR is ditching it, I’m downloading a live cd right now.
Stay tuned for more exciting adventures. Knoppix is the current front runner, but only because of its superior hardware detection.
Related Comments (10)
Looks like what you really want is Kubuntu. If you haven’t already it would be very much worth trying the Kubuntu Alternate Install CD. Its available from the main ubuntu site with the normal CD and is for exactly this situation (hardware issues). The actual Kubuntu system should support as much hardware as any other distro due to the up-to-the-minute packages they strive for.
If the laptop can boot from a USB stick it might be worth trying to copy the CD image to the stick and boot from it. Instructions available: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/a-usb-stick-grub-and-ubuntu/
I got a new laptop a month ago. Spent five days solid installing, uninstalling then reinstalling distros.
Hope you get it working as you want it.
William
I just started this the same process two days ago with my newly acquired dv9210us, but I’m mostly focused on Kubuntu. I’d really like to get it working. I have tried both the 64bit and the 32bit versions. The 64bit seems a bit more stable after specifying napic and nolapic as the boot options. However, without the ability to have flash player or Skype - it really makes it hard to swallow as my primary machine. In 32bit, I also have to specify acpi=off (sometimes…sometimes it boots without that, sometimes it doesn’t.) However, with acpi off, it’s very unstable and even typing ends up doing strange things.
What’s strange, though is that I have not had any problems booting with the Kubuntu live CDs. The Edgy install CD boots fine and everything runs. It only has problems after it’s installed and boots from the hard drive. Also, the Edgy 64bit DVD booted
fine as well. Again, no problems until it booted from the hard drive. To add to all that is that sometimes it will boot without issue. Also, I updated to the latest BIOS from HP. That didn’t seem to make any difference, but it was worth a shot.
I haven’t even moved past this stage to try to get wireless working. It’s also a potential show-stopper, but nothing worth focusing on if the OS isn’t even stable.
Have you had any luck with Fedora or Sabayon? I’d be very interested to hear your final results and settle on a stable linux distro for this thing.
-Eric
I settled on PCLinuxOS for a variety of reasons (including an excellent wifi tool.) There were some intial stability problems, but I tracked these down to APIC - once I turned that off, everything became solid.
I’m not 100% pleased with PCLinuxOS though; it’s RPM based, and the apt repositories are 1/3 the size of Ubuntu’s, so there has been some software that I use on my desktop that I haven’t found for the laptop (I could compile from source, but ugh.)
Anyway, I think once Kubuntu 7.04 is officially released, I’ll give that another go on the laptop. The wireless was quite straightforward; follow the howto here, skipping the reinstall of ndiswrapper: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092
Thanks for the tips - I think I have everything working now. The link to the wifi was invaluable. Thanks! I would have never thought to use the Dell drivers instead of the HP ones. Although, I’d be willing to bet that the HP drivers might just work with ndiswrapper anyway. Just a hunch though.
I hadn’t tried PCLinuxOS before today. It’s fairly nice. Although I do miss the larger and more up to date repositories that ubuntu/kubuntu has. I had to *gasp* compile one of my favorite games instead of using a package. Been a while since I’ve had to do that, that’s for sure!
For what it’s worth, I downloaded and tried the Kubuntu 7.04 beta today. I wasn’t even able to get it to boot into the GUI.
Also, which wifi manager are you using? I’m playing with kwifimanager, but it’s somewhat of a hassle. I have to go into the configuration manager to activate my config (after typing in my root password) before it will connect. I can get it to autolaunch to the tray with KDE - but it still won’t connect. Is there a better tool to use?
Thanks,
-Eric
knetworkmanager seems pretty nice. It’s the one that kubuntu 7.04 will ship with. You have to get NetworkManager to start during init.
Are you finding any weirdness with entering text? Sometimes my cursor will jump a paragraph or two up while I’m typing. Also, the numlock seems flakey — home and end sometimes work with it on, sometimes with it off, and intermittently at that.
The text input problem (at least in my experience) has to do with the touchpad. If I brush it with my hand while typing, it’ll click and jump the cursor to wherever the mouse is. When I use an external mouse I simply disable the touchpad and that solves my problems.
The home and end keys seem to always work for me. Though I don’t turn numlock on, I really haven’t had a need to yet.
-Eric
For what it’s worth, I just tried the latest Mandriva and it works flawlessly (so far, I’ve only been running it for a day.) APIC works ACPI works, wireless works with WPA (with ndiswrapper) without having to edit any config files or write any startup scripts.
The problem I’ve been having with PCLinuxOS is that every now and again (two to three times per day) the wireless card would stop working and a message would appear saying the system is disabling IRQ #20. At that point I would have to reboot to get wireless working again. Needless to say that is very annoying.
-Eric
I got kubuntu installed (see my latest post). However, wireless isn’t (yet) working.
I use a HP dv9000 and I have arrived at the same distro, after trying to make work
severel other like : Ubuntu, Susse, and Fedora Core 64,32.
Now, using PCLinuxOs, I have the same problem with the disabling irq (wireless) , after a while.
I try to boot with the kernel parameter ‘irqpoll’, as suggested in the /var/log/kernel/errors
but no great improvement. Also, from time to time, the system freezes
With noapic, nolapic it worse. Have you found a solution for this ?
The BIOS for this HP is shit, it only let’s you change the date and the boot order and that’s it.
thanks
Hey, (as above) I ended up on Kubuntu, using the non-graphical install CD (although you can use the live cd if you edit the boot menu, and boot w/ noapic). Installing wireless was simple (just search for broadcom 1390 on the ubuntu forums) and works well (network manager is brilliant). Much as I admire the aesthetics (and, in this case, hardware support) of PCLinuxOS, I gave it up in the end because of its roots in Mandrake - there are just nowhere near the number of official packages as there are for ubuntu, and rpms seem to be one step behind debs.