New HP Pavilion dv8372ea - LiveCD and general installation

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Hi fellow gentoo'ers

I was very close to buying myself a Sony VAIO VGN-FE550G I decided to take the BIG plunge and invest in a HP DV8372ea as my new desktop replacement/mobile development workstation.

Why ?

Significantly bigger 17" screen running 1440X900 resolution
Slightly faster 1.8 dual core processor
SATA controllers and a pair of 80gig SATA disks
Dedicated PCI express Nvidia 7600 with 256mb ram

it was a significant purchase but its a great bit of kit as you would imagine. The screen is very nice to work with and there is plenty of space to layout eclipse and other dev tools to make them easier to work with.

Gentoo Here We Come !!!

So - I set about my task as normal - blow away the nasty XP home installation and set things up ready for dual-boot between XP pro and my fave linux distro - i.e. Gentoo.

With the tedium of installing XP complete it was time to begin my third journey with Gentoo (already had an old Althon running several years ago and still today have a Shuttle SN25P running Gentoo as my primary development OS in the office - awesomely quick and responsive). So I figured this time I'd save myself some of the hassle of doing a stage1 build - I've done it twice now - and whilst fun - the liveCD seems like a quick way of getting a system up and running so you can then begin to recompile and taylor based upon requirements after you have tuned compilation flags and options.

So with a liveCD ISO burned to disk I booted up to see what happened. Ended up in a basic gnome environment with basic 1024x768 - not an issue its an installation platform after all. So I began the process of running the graphical installer. This failed a few times with it getting suck at the start (thanks again to the wonderful gentoo forums for quickly finding the reason for this - check the 'my network interface is already configured' box) but then hey presto ! the installer ran.

All Done - no more stage1 mayhem !!!

On rebooting I was expecting to find myself with a gentoo decorated Grub loader and Windows XP and Gentoo to pick from - no XP - but gentoo its there so off we go. Once into the OS I was able to modify grub.conf and my XP install still worked on the next reboot (phew!

) not a major gripe and easy to fix.

The next stage was trying to figure out why I had no networking. I think the Kernel on the liveCD is not quite new enough to recognise some of the newer integrated lan devices which is a shame. I visited /usr/src/linux to find there was no symlink to the kernel sources - I guess this is because the kernel image is taken straight from the CD image.

Also - no ALSA support seemed to have been found. but I could live with that as all these things are straightforward to resolve once you have kernel sources and you can start making a configuration to match hardware. With neither a wired or wireless network available it made it quite difficult to continue (maybe I am just not experieced enough know what to get from elsewhere and move into the portage distfiles directory)

I knew that this point my knowledge of what to do next was going to hold me back.

Giving up - for the time being

So I figured I'd try another distro to help me understand what hardware was present with maybe a newer bulkier kernel that may find some of my hardware. I just happened to have an Ubuntu LiveCD hanging around so I booted it and hey presto - all networking found, all special keys working, basic nv nvidia working, synaptix(?) mouse pad support - only a 386 spec kernel so no dual core support but thats a start I guess.

I am not proud of what happened next - I decided to blow away the gentoo partitions and installed Ubunto - but JUST FOR NOW.

Once Ubuntu was installed the box came back up with sound and nice graphical 'comfort' to help the new linux user find his/her feet. I found the environment very strange after gentoo - its all a bit weird not being able to use emerge to figure out what to install/what to upgrade etc. The graphical tools for apt and the synaptic package manager seem weird by comparison. So next I set about getting proper NVIDIA kernel support - not too difficult - and SMP support via the 686 kernel. This wasnt too bad but I did breifly have no wireless lan during this process.

Am I pleased with Ubuntu ? er - Yes and No - I can see why its popular - its pretty much working out of the box which is nice - but it doesn't feel as responsive Gentoo :cry:

and I dont intend to use it for long. This is no reflection on Ubuntu - but I just want to get back to what suites me best.

What Can I Do Next ?

If I dont use the full livecd graphical installer and perform a regular stage1,2 or 3 installation from a 2006 universal install CD I guess I am still going to suffer from lan devices not working as above ?

Can anyone suggest an approach I can follow ?

Once up an running I hope to contribute my findings to linux.laptop.net to help others who wish to use gentoo on the HP DV8300 series laptops.

Any advice is greatly appreciated
_________________
Regards

Ian.

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Well,

I got bored this afternoon - the Ubuntu installation is no more

I downloaded the regular minimal installer CD and it finds my wired network adapter !!!!

so its back to the handbook - will let you know how it goes

just have to make sure I can get to grub being present before midnight LOL - need it for work tomorrow LOL
_________________
Regards

Ian.

davascript · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 618 Location: Pennsylvania

Even if you dont get your system to boot today/tonight, use knoppix so you can use your computer while finalizing the install of gentoo.

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

So far so good

I guess this thread may make a useful guide for dv8300 users - so I'll just blog in here until it can make it into a proper page for linux-laptop.

just upgrading GCC before I start to compile things - seems I am a tiny weeny bit to early to go with 2006.1 so I wont attempt upgrading right up to GCC 4.1 and the new NPTL stuff (maybe this is already there ?).

make.conf set like so:

davascript · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 618 Location: Pennsylvania

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Thanks for the advice davascript

Ah - PA - I lived there for a while back in 1996 - I miss it sometimes - I was in a little place called Bluebell working for CA.

I just wanted the luxury safety net of XP tomorrow so if I had more work than 1 computer can do I'd had least have that (unlikely LOL).

I guess any cd loader that uses grub would work too if I did something like this in grubs console ?

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

All done apart from I get kernel panic when I try to boot

my boot device is the 2nd SATA drive i.e. /dev/sdb

partitioned as follows:

/dev/sdb1 boot
/dev/sdb2 swap
/dev/sdb3 /

I get kernel panic like so:

cyrillic · Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 11:47 pm Post subject:

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Another small problem,

just went to re-compile the kernel and place the image into boot and found that /boot is not actually mounted ???

I can mount it manually using mount /dev/sdb1 /boot

but its not done at start up. Here is my /etc/fstab

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Can you believe it !!!! :evil:

Just working away on my other Gentoo SN25P machine - saved a source file in eclipse and got an error saying cannot save - filesystem mounted read-only :cry:

on rebooting the box it cannot mount the / file system anymore.

so I am now sat watching the output of

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

All is not well on the Shuttle :cry:

seeing lots of status=0x51 DriveReady SeekComplete Error lines in the ouput

I managed to pull a few useful files from the ext3 partition by mounting it in XP - but it looks like the entire installation on the shuttle box is knackered - just as well I'm making good progress with the laptop.
_________________
Regards

Ian.

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Making good progress

I can get nice 1440x900 frame buffer but no splash image ? complains about not finding images on the ramdisk image built (2600.0) them - fine on live cd so it must work at some point LOL (maybe thats a genkernel and its compiled in ?) I'm after the nice purple/grey one from the live cd with graphical installer but its not playing ball LOL.

Nice kernel - maybe a few things to get rid of but its there.
Xorg is running
nVidia kernel drivers working for GForce GO 7600
Synaptix mouse pad working
Black light working (apart from in fb mode it turns off and never turns back on)
Wired lan working

hardware things left to do:

intel wireless lan
check usb
check firewire
enable external vga and try twin view
check touchpad and external usb mouse support (mouse0 currently turned off in xorg.conf or the no core pointer is found for synaptix)
try and wire up the custom laptop keys
check the ALSA layer with HD Sound driver

Gnome now building
Theme Gnome to my tastes
Some desktop apps
Office
multiple sun java jvms
hopefully Eclipse 3.2 with the J2EE webtools installed
tomcat
apache
mysql
mysql tools

hopefully my .history file will remember most of the commands I've done so I can make them into some sort of guide for these systems.

Thanks again to everyone on this forum - every thread helps you get there.

ps: took to having to place ubuntu on the dead gentoo shuttle for now

not enough time to fix it proper and hopefully live cd 2006.1 will improve things for getting a base 'lazy' installation.
_________________
Regards

Ian.

Ian G · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 48 Location: Derby, UK

Well - I spent a day out of the office in london so time to road test the laptop - a totally mobile gentoo only day

All the power management stuff is now working a treat - after a 2hr and 45m train journey I still had 35% battery to go even with the brightness up on the big screen.

Works pretty good now:

my mobile ms mouse just takes over from the synaptics pad when I plug it in which is cool (would be nice if I could somehow control a dynamic change to the input devices in X to shut off the touch pad when the usb mouse showed up)

Suspend feature is not working at the moment - I'm not sure why

laptop volume/mute keys were very easy to confirm purely in the gnome keyboard shortcuts tool. Just need to get the DVD button to lauch the movie player and the calc button to lauch the calc and we are done.

My wireless lan works out without any security on a safe access port - but it does stop after a while and I cant restart net.eth1 (the intel wireless lan) afterwards.

Sound seems a little low - but good enough. Had some bizarre problems with the esound event stuff the other day - just seemed to stop and I had to rebuild esound and the alsa stuff although they didnt come up as dependant modules of anything upgraded.

Another small problem in gnome - when I select a file and say move to waste basket the actual file browser closes ? maybe I should just recompile the entire of gnome ? revdep-rebuild says everything is good - so it could be a bug but I doubt it - gnome 2.14 was fine on my old machine until the disk went bad.

I will dump up my current kernel config and make opts - I guess it would be a good base point to start from for other users as its been solid as a rock bar the above for about 5 days.
_________________
Regards

Ian.