Update: After my laptop completelly stopped turning on, I managed to get HP to repair it under warranty. I couldn't get it repaired when it was just turning off randomly, because HP required me to run some Windows-based diagnostics software. The technical support is quite bad. My computer was fixed but came with a missing memory card. I complained and they promptly sent me a memory card. I now use Fedora Core 5, but I'm still having some configuration problems (see the end of this page).
I bought an HP L2000 laptop a few weeks ago and installed Fedora Core 4 for amd64 in it. As I started configuring it a while ago, I don't remember many details exactly, but I will try to write some important hints here. First, let me show the output of /sbin/lspci:
I don't remember if I had to do anything special to install Fedora, but maybe I had to add noapic to the kenel parameters. Anyway, the best parameters I found are shown below. You can set the parameters in "/boot/grub/grub.conf". The no_timer_check is said to fix some problems related to the clock. The noapic is necessary for the built-in wireless card to work. The ignore_ff_buttons=PWRF makes it possible to come back from suspend to RAM using the power button. After installing, I recommend you to update it with yum. Unfortunatelly, kde laptop suspend function doesn't work with kernels 2.6.12-1.1456_FC4, 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4, and 2.6.13-1.1526_FC4. Hopefully, it will be solved in future kernels. A piece of my grub.conf file is:
This computer comes with an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics card. Someone reported to get it working with the livna.org ATI driver rpm. It did not work for me, but maybe it was because I installed the driver from ATI website first. I recommend you to try livna.org driver, because ATI driver has some conflicting libraries that show up when you try to upgrade xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL. To get the driver rpm, go to www.ati.com, drivers and software, linux, linux x86_64, motherboards with ATI graphics, Radeon Xpress 200 Series, and download X.Org 6.8 rpm. Make a backup copy of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Install the rpm as root with "rpm -Uvh FILENAME". Run fglrxconfig as root to configure the device. It will screw up with synaptics mouse driver and some other stuff. You can compare the original file with the new one to get the best of both or simply use mine. If you want to do it yourself, you'll need to add a new resolution "1280x768" as the default. If you use mine, you'll probably want to change some synaptics settings.
Making sound work is very easy when you know what to do. It took me forever to find it out. All you need is to turn external amplifier on in the mixer window (it is there on kmix, I don't know about gnome). You can look at my screen on the picture to see the mixer. To get mp3 working, as usual in Redhat systems, you need to download some packages (gstreamer-plugins-mp3, for example) from livna (or somewhere else). A detailed set of general hints about Fedora 4 customization can be found here.
To get wireless working, you need to do a few things:
Software suspend works without much effort. Sometimes it is not 100% stable, but in general it works fine. Sometimes I need to restart X with ctrl-alt-backspace. You can enable software suspend on kde laptop controls (kcontrol: Power Control -> Laptop Battery, for example). Somehow, you can't enable it with the new kernels I listed above. With these kernels, you can suspend to ram by running: "echo mem >/sys/power/state" as root. Make sure you have kernel option "ignore_ff_buttons=PWRF", in order to be able to return from suspend without turning off your computer at the same time. You also need to remove sample.conf from /etc/acpi/events. Notice that renaming the file is not enough. You need to make sure it's not in that directory. The problem is that you won't be able to turn of your computer with the power button.
I decided to use a short script to make the power button suspend to ram instead of turning off. I can use the menu to turn it off. First, I created a file powerbutton.conf in /etc/acpi/events with:
I also created the file /usr/sbin/suspendtoram and ran "chmod a+x /usr/sbin/suspendtoram" to make it executable. The content of the file is:
Going to kcontrol "Sound -> Sound System -> Hardware" and setting "Select the Audio Device" to "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" prevents some sound server errors.
If you go to kcontrol, in the Regional and Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout, you can configure your keyboard to "Laptop/notebook Compaq (eg. Armada, Evo). This way, the volume keys will work nicely under kde.
Cpuspeed takes care of reducing the cpu speed depending on the level of activity, in order to save battery. My CPU seems to be able to run only at 800 or 1600 MHz. You can configure it on the file "/etc/cpuspeed.conf" if you want. You can set driver to powernow-k8, but it doesn't seem to be necessary.
On "fireglcontrolpanel" you can set the second monitor behavior. (Clone mode is normally what I want.)
Screen brightness keys and numlock keys work without problems.
Ethernet network works fine.
Cd/dvd reading and recording works fine.
USB works fine.
The card reader doesn't seem to have any support by now. :(
On rare occasions, the screen doesn't synchronize after returning from DPMS power saving mode.
I'm very happy with this laptop overall. At first, many things didn't work well, but now I'm impressed that software suspend works mostly out of the box. The AMD Turion 64 CPU is very low power and never too hot. The fan is off most of the time and the temperature is always under 65C, even when enconding MP3 or XVID. I'm a little disappointed with the CPU speed, though. It's ok when encoding MP3 with lame, but awful when encoding XVID.
The wireless card is "supported" by the bcm43xx driver which comes with the Kernel, but I didn't find this driver stable. I had to disable bcm43xx in the modules.alias and modules.pcimap files (at /lib/modules/KERNEL_VERSION/). Then, I could make ndiswrapper work. I am also having problems with the ATI proprietary driver, which crashes when I connect a projector to the laptop (but not when I connect my LCD or CRT to it). Setting mirror instead of clone mode solves the problem, but creates other problems.
