I decided to respond in public because my comments below may be applicable to other laptops with Broadcom wifi and/or nVidia video cards and even desktops. Brad Bourn wrote:
On Monday 11 July 2005 01:01 am, Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas wrote:
In short, I would avoid HP/Compaq laptops (64-bit or 32-bit) and stick with SuSE, especially if I needed a 64-bit distribution. I would also consider installing apt-get and its synaptic GUI.
I hear you pain and frustration. Just to give some credit, I have the zv5000 (HP amd_64) laptop and love it. everything works except the wireless lan because there isn't 64bit windows drivers to reverse engineer.
--If the zv5000 is identical to mine (Compaq Presario R3000) inside and mine has the Broadcom wifi chipset, shouldn't yours have the same also? In order to get the wifi Broadcom chipset to work, you need ndiswrapper or Linuxant's drivers (the former free; you can get a 30-day evaluation for the latter, after which you must pay about US$20 to get the permanent license). So THERE ARE 64-bit Windows drivers for my Broadcom chipset and I've been using them for a while with the Linuxant drivers. Make sure you get the latest ndiswrapper or Linuxant drivers --the latter at least 2.28-- because the Broadcom chipset seems to have troouble working with memory over 1 GB; the newest ndiswrapper/Linuxant drivers use a workaround for this. The Linuxant web site (www.linuxant.com) has a link to the appropriate Windows 64-bit drivers for the Broadcom chipset. It seems that the the HP/Compaq laptops with less resolution were more reliable, apparently because the pixel clock did not run as fast and the video card ran cooler.
The only trouble I had was the newer nvidia drivers. They needed to be forced to recognize that they were on a laptop. Once you use the binary drivers from nvidia, there is some more tweaking needed to get suspending to disk to work (I haven't done yet), but is still possible.
--Good points! You need to enter 'options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=0' in your '/etc/modprobe.conf.local' file. My understanding is that supsend to disk and 3D acceleration are incompatible on this laptop for the time being. Let us know if you find out otherwise. To the best of my knowledge, there are people who recompiled the ACPI DSDT (see the SuSE 9.3 Administration Guide, p. 307, on this --aren't those SuSE manuals just great?) but still have been unable to get 3D and suspend to disk to work together on this laptop.
When I got the laptop, shortly after the harddrive went bad. I was able to get a human on the phone and a new drive being crossed shipped within 1/2 hour of dialing.
--Yes, their customer service (most of it in India, as I found out during my numerous interactions with them) is quite good.
I WILL /WOULD get another HP laptop (amd 64) if I had the chance. I love mine, and SuSE!
B-)