Friday, October 22, 2004

Installing ubuntu 4.10 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn't find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don't seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless -- works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth -- don't have any other bluetooth devices, haven't tried
* IR -- haven't tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic -- works
* SD bay -- works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it's menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu...

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn't loaded. Using 'sudo network-admin' fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing -- watch here for more info]