Installing Debian on an HP Pavilion zv5410US

From LinuxNewbie

I am going to gloss over install questions where I chose either the default answer or something that was not relevant to the rest of the world (like the host name (pavilion) ).

I used the Debian Sarge RC2 Net Install. This should work with later releases also.

I chose a single partition because this is a laptop and I dislike running out of /usr or /home space when I have much free in another. I would summarize this as lazy, and I find it works well for single user workstations.

I used wired network because the RealTek 8139 driver works, and the wireless Broadcom will require ndiswrapper. It obtained a DHCP address.

After walking through the install (which took no time at all) and chosing an http repository I think I restarted. At some point it asked what packages to install, and I chose manual. It loads aptitude and at this point there was really anything to add because the system wasn't up all the way. g twice to download...

About 5 minutes later...

Once I was sitting at a prompt I loaded aptitude as root. I suggest you see the aptitude link above if you don't know how to use it. It is a good tool and easy to use.

Steps:

• Remove the four exim packages (I don't need a "real" email server)
• Add nullmailer (This emails a regular smtp address with the logs)

When it asks, the smarthost is the smtp server, and give it your email address. If you care about logs anyway.

• Add wireless tools
• Add ndiswrapper-source
• Add ndiswrapper-utils
• Add mozilla
• Add xchat
• Add gimp
• Add wine
• Add wine-utils
• Add x-window-system
• Add kde

The last two will be enough to get a working gui.

I also found the latest kernel that was optimized for my CPU. I got a 32 bit because I had trouble getting nvidia graphics drivers compiled against the AMD64 kernel. I will revisit this someday.

• Add kernel-image-2.6.8-10-k7
• Add kernel-headers-2.6.8-10-k7

The headers package lets you compile drivers against it. This is critical for ndiswrapper and nvidia drivers. (and VMWare is you have it)

I downloaded the latest nvidia linux driver from http://nvidia.com from ia32 (Intel Arch 32 bit). Once it downloaded I ran it as root:

sh NVIDIA[press tab to complete the filename]

My laptop has a 1280x800 screen. To get it to work I had to modify /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. I indicate the section and what I added.

Section "Device"
        Option "IgnoreEdid" "1"
# If it says Driver "nv", you either
#   haven't installed the binary nvidia driver
#   or should change it by hand
        Driver "nvidia"

Section "Monitor"
        ModeLine "1280x800" 83.5 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 -HSync -VSync

Section "Screen"
# didn't add DefaultDepth, but for reference
        DefaultDepth 24
        SubSection "Display"
# You don't add Depth 24, but since that is my default depth, that is what I changed
                Depth 24
                Modes "1280x800"

I logged out of KDE (because I was in it) and pressed ctrl+alt+backspace to restart X.

I downloaded the Windows XP drivers for the internal wireless from HP's website. They are in .exe format, so I ran it to unpack it, and chose the default location.

wine SP29361A.exe

Next, ndiswrapper. Note that it is a bz2, so we use a j instead of z to unpack.

su
cd /usr/src
tar xjvf ndis[tab]
cd modules/ndiswrapper
make
make install

Now is the time to add the driver to ndiswrapper. In my case I saved the Windows XP driver to the wine directory (~/.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/SP29361A), but lets pretend that I copied it to /home/revantine/wifi/

# cd /home/revantine/wifi
# ndisrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf
# ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5a driver present, hardware present
# modprobe ndiswrapper
# ndiswrapper -m

The modprobe loads the module for ndiswrapper. If you are using an internal card you can add it to modules for on-boot load, or to hotplug with ndiswrapper --hotplug if you are using something like usb or pcmcia.

You can run iwconfig to see the listing for the wireless (wifi) card.

lo      no wireless entensions.

eth0    no wireless entensions.

eth1    no wireless entensions.

sit0    no wireless entensions.

wlan0   IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:off/any
        Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
        Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Rx-Power:25 dBm
        RTS the:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B
        Encryption key:off
        Power Management:off
        Link Quality:100/100  Signal level:-10 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
        Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
        Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:11   Missed beacon:0

I will add additional information about configuring wireless by hand another time. Each distro will vary slightly in what configuration files you need to change or add to for automatic connection on boot. I suggest you google or drop in to channel and ask.