[juneau-lug] HP Pavilion dv9000z

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 12:39:02 -0900

To replace my dead Averatec, my wife let me buy a new HP 9000z from Costco.  
(Their prebuilt part number is a dv9013cl.)  AMD Turion 64 x2 ML-50 (1.6GHz, 
256kb L2 x2), 1GB RAM, 120GB SATA, 17" display, nVidea graphics, nVidea 
ethernet, broadcom bcl4300 a/b/g wireless, the obligatory lightscribe DVD.  
The killer app for me was a full sized keyboard complete with numpad.  I can 
play nethack on this laptop without an external keyboard.

It's running Debian Etch for AMD64 arch with KDE.  So far everything is fine.  
Apparently there are ACPI problems for Turions on the nForce chipset, so I 
have to add the `pci=usepirqmask` boot option.  However the laptop certainly 
supports Linux, contrary to the rather alarming post on the San Antonio's LUG 
forums. :)  (In SATLug's defense, my BIOS revision is dated after their 
discussion of the laptop - so HP may have fixed some things.)

Aside from the ACPI problem, the only other issue was the Etch installer 
version I used wanted to use the fglrx driver (ATI's proprietary driver!) 
instead of the nv driver for my nVidea video.  Sort of bizarre that a Debian 
installer would even think of using a proprietary driver, much less get the 
manufacturer completely wrong.  Maybe Ubuntu is pushing some stuff back to 
the installer team?  :)

HP did some interesting things with this laptop.  The quick-launch DVD player 
is actually XP embedded living in a 1G partition on the drive.  I can boot to 
that with Grub, although the little start button for it just gets me to Grub.  
I'll see if I can't figure out how it was telling the Windows bootloader 
which partition to boot to.  Maybe I can get it to automatically start the 
embedded partition from Grub as well.  However not blowing away the partition 
leaves me with a working low-power DVD player, and a working remote-control.

The system restore partition is usually some sort of unknown partition type.  
On this laptop, it's another bootable FAT32 partition, and I can boot to that 
with Grub as well.  Once I install a second 2.5" SATA drive and migrate 
Debian over to that, I'll restore the first drive back to XP Media Edition.  
I'll probably swap the drives at that point, since the 2nd drive isn't 
bootable in the BIOS according to HP (although putting grub on hd0 would 
quickly resolve that.)

A sister laptop, a dv6000z series, is also available at Costco.  This one has 
a 15.4" display, but the processor is improved to ML-52 (with 512kb caches) 
and has 2GB RAM.  And it doesn't have a numpad, only has room for 1 drive.
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