Fedora Linux on the HP Compaq 6910p notebook

This page contains some brief notes about my experiences getting Fedora 8 Linux working on the HP Compaq 6910p laptop.

Here is a brief summary of what's working on this machine. Basically everything I've looked at works, but I haven't tried the modem or bluetooth support.

Feature	Under Linux	Notes
Widescreen 1280×800 display	Works	Install driver
3D effects (Compiz)	Works	Need to edit one file to make video work
Sound	Works	No special action needed
DVD/CD writer	Works	No special action needed
Touchpad	Works	No special action needed
Suspend to RAM	Works	No special action needed
Suspend to disk	Works	No special action needed
CPU speed scaling	Works	No special action needed
Ethernet	Works	No special action needed
Wireless	Works	No special action needed
Modem	Untested	Never tried it, so I don't know whether it works
Bluetooth	Untested	Never tried it

Basically Fedora runs pretty nicely on this machine. A few small tricks are needed as described here. Complete installation should take you about an hour.

As usual, these notes are merely a document of things that worked for me. There's no guarantee they will work for you, and there are some things you could do while installing Linux that would really mess up your computer bad. I'm not aware of anything that will do that other than flashing your BIOS, which I don't recommend, but hey, you never know. You have been warned. All opinions expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by the University of Michigan.

Installation

The machine came with Windows XP Professional. I wanted to keep that, so I resized the Windows partition, as described in many other places. There are various tools you can use for this. I used the free GParted Live. This program only supports old-fashioned parallel ATA (PATA) disks, not the newer serial (SATA) that comes with this machine. To get around this, I switched the machine to PATA compatibility mode before resizing – hit F10 as the machine boots then go to the configuration menu and disable "SATA Native Mode". Then resize the partition and switch SATA Native Mode back on again before installing Fedora.

Windows came in a 100GB NTFS partition, which I resized to 60GB, leaving 40GB for Linux. (Also there was another smaller NTFS partition containing Windows restore data, which I left alone.)

I did a network install using the basic boot CD, but installing from DVD should be similar. Just stick the disk in the drive and fire it up.

For some reason the Fedora 8 installer hangs on this computer, but there is a simple fix: edit the boot options when the install menu comes up and add the options floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm. I have no idea why this works – neither option sounds particularly promising – but various people found that this works on other computers and it does with this one too.

After that things proceed as normal. When you get to the part about partitioning the disk, you can accept the default partitioning or you may want to do a manual partitioning yourself, which is what I did. I made a 10GB primary partition for / and an extended partition with 2GB of swap space and the rest on /home.

The rest of the installation is vanilla. When it's done installing it'll reboot and the first time it boots it will run through some setup stuff – creating a user account and so forth. After that you're done. Congratulations! You've installed Linux.

Tricks

Networking: The first thing you'll want to do after installing is get the network working properly. Both Ethernet and wireless work perfectly out of the box. I also very much like NetworkManager, which I think is turned on by default. If it's not you can turn it on under the "services" configuration option. Once NetworkManager is running, you can either just plug in an Ethernet cable or select and join a wireless network chosen from the list that you get when you click the NetworkManager icon in the system tray.
Updates and yum: The yum updater program comes already configured to install software from the standard Fedora repositories. But it's useful to configure it also to search the Livna package repository, which contains a lot of good stuff not in Fedora. Just type
```
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
```
as root and you're good to go. (If you don't have a network connection, then you can't do this. On the other hand, if you don't have a network connection, then you can't use Livna at all. Or yum for that matter.)
Then you might want to update everything to the newest version. Type yum update and wait a couple of hours.
In addition I installed a bunch of other things that I consider useful, including xfig, inkscape, scribus, acroread, amarok, mplayer-gui, xemacs, ddd, octave, fftw, blas, lapack, grace, labplot, flash-plugin, sshfs, xcdroast, and audacity. (Note that acroread and flash-plugin have to be downloaded directly from Adobe, which provides them in the form of convenient RPM files for direct install on Fedora. Just do a Google search and you'll find them.) I also removed totem, which is mostly worthless and causes some annoying problems for playing media files.
Video: This laptop comes in two versions, one with an Intel video card, which I think is supported by the standard Intel driver, and one with an ATI Radeon X2300 card, which is the version that I have. This card is not directly supported by any of the standard open-source drivers at present, so the Fedora installer chooses the default VESA driver instead, which only sort of works – it produces video but it only works at 1024x768 resolution, which looks bad on the 1280x800 wide screen of the laptop. You can fix this by installing the proprietary ATI driver from Livna. Type yum install kmod-fglrx as root. Then restart the machine.
Touchpad: Touchpad works fine out of the box, but the horizontal scrolling thing really annoyed me when using the web – Firefox thinks you're pressing the "forward" and "back" buttons repeatedly and gets very confused. You can fix this by finding the "InputDevice" section for the synaptics device in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding the line Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0".
Suspend: Both suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM work fine out of the box. With earlier versions of the ATI video driver they did not, but since version 8.455 everything works fine.
3D effects: Compiz, which provides 3D effects for the desktop, works nicely on this machine. You can enable it (in Gnome) under the System/Preferences menu item. The only slight hitch is that video playback using mplayer becomes flickery under Compiz, as reported elsewhere. A fix is to edit the file ~/.mplayer/config and add the line vo="x11". Then the flicker disappears.

That's about it. Overall, this is a pretty good machine for Linux. Everything seems to be well supported and it runs smoothly.

Last modified: February 25, 2008

Mark Newman