Some quick background:

A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a used Compaq V6000Z laptop from my girlfriend’s dad - it had only been used for six months by her sister and he decided it was time to reallocate it somewhere else. So, I bought it for cheap ($400) and decided that, when I got a spare moment, I’d throw Linux on there, just to find out how well it works on a laptop. Since I run Ubuntu on my home PC without much trouble and have been throwing it on servers at work whenever they’re not paying attention, I figured I’d just stick with what I knew and go from there.

The install began on Saturday. I’m still not quite done tweaking it, which is not encouraging.

Before I start explaining what’s going on here, I want to be clear about something - I’m not blaming Ubuntu for what’s going on with my laptop. Compaq and HP laptops (especially the AMD-based ones, like mine) are so notoriously poor with Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically that they have a number of threads dedicated to getting Ubuntu installed on them. The problems, near as I can tell, generally stem from poor wireless support for Broadcom wireless cards, odd BIOS issues, and somewhat sporadic support from Nvidia on the onboard graphics cards. I know that Ubuntu can only work with what it has, I know that HP does not support Linux on my model of laptop, and I’m okay with that. I’m sure there are other, better, more Linux-friendly laptops out there. I’m definitely interested in researching them in the future.

So, here’s where I’m at so far, after a couple of days of fiddling…

1. Got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installed after finding this walkthrough, which gave me the necessary flags to hand the boot CD. Once the right flags were on there, things improved dramatically; before that, I was getting frustrated as GDM would never load.

2. Got wireless sort of working. This walkthrough helped supplement the instructions in the previous walkthrough, and I also managed to get a little more information on the bcm4xx-fwcutter utility by following this thread. That said, it’s still only semi-reliable; sometimes it finds and connects, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the little blue light is on. Sometimes it’s not. I’m probably going to have to break down and just get ndiswrapper going. Ugh.

3. Graphics are working great. Haven’t had too many troubles with Nvidia’s drivers, except for the usual issues whenever a kernel update happens. Speaking of which, it would be absolutely wonderful if there was some way for kernel updates to not break video drivers. I have the same problem with my home PC. The problem, of course, is that the proprietary drivers require me to compile against the kernel to install them, so whenever the kernel changes, it breaks… still annoying. However, I’m getting used to the procedure enough to actually keep the driver install script handy so that, when GDM goes down in a pile of flames on the next kernel update, I’ll be ready. I honestly don’t know who to blame for this… those “in the know” would probably blame the writers of the drivers, but I’ll point out that running updates in Windows machines doesn’t routinely break drivers (not that it’s unprecedented, mind you - it’s just unusual, whereas this seems to happen on my Linux systems routinely). Speaking of which, this same rant applies to VMWare Server. It’d be great if I didn’t have to recompile it after every kernel upgrade, too. That’d be swell.

4. Having major issues with battery management. Updated to the latest kernel version, suddenly lost the battery meter. Discovered that the latest kernel version breaks acpi, downgraded to the original install version. Reinstalled my video drivers (see #3), discovered the battery meter still wasn’t there. Now it’s there… sometimes. Worse yet, my wireless is much more flaky than it was on the up-to-date kernel version. The wireless was absolutely bulletproof on the latest kernel version. Now I’m left trying to decide if I want to have a working battery meter or working wireless. I’m not exactly relishing my choices on this one.

So… yeah. I’m not exactly thrilled. That said, it’s still usable; it’s just not as nice as I had hoped for. I’m still not reinstalling XP - the battery life I kill in having an anti-virus program autoscan every login is not worth it. Besides, I like Linux. Maybe I’ll just do something really daring and stupid and throw PC-BSD on this thing and see if the BSD kernel is any better behaved. It’s not like I have anything worthwhile on this laptop yet anyways.

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