Linux on the HP Pavilion N5470 Laptop

I purchased this notebook (reconditioned) on December 17, 2001. This page is mostly copied from the N5470 page by douglas@pobox.com. I didn't realize there was another N5430 page at the time.

I installed RedHat 7.2.

The laptop came with (rough details):

Component Status
USB didn't try
Mouse PS/2 - Turned on Emulate3Buttons, following Douglas' advice. There's a bios option to recognize an external mouse at boot, which does work.
Video I mostly slavishly followed Douglas' advice, which was:
Requires XFree86 4.1.0 where it is just barely supported. No acceleration as far as I can tell.

Select the Trident CyberBlade 9525 during the install. I know Cyberblade or Cyberblade XP would be more correct, but they install an XFree86 3.3.6 driver when you select them. After you finish installing RedHat and reboot you need to add the following entry in the Device Section: ChipSet "CyberBladeXPm"

Here's my XF86Config-4 file.

I can add that picking TrueColor is a bad idea. Pick 16 bits and be happy.

Network The RedHat installer correctly picked the tulip driver, and it works.
Modem Didn't try. Douglas thinks it's a winmodem.
Sound The card is a ESS Allegro ES1988. If you run /usr/sbin/sndconfig from RedHat 7.2, it detects it, but then claims it's disabled, and says I need to set PnPOS to "no" in the BIOS. There is no such option.

So I configured by hand: I added "alias sound-slot-0 maestro3" to /etc/modules.conf and rebooted. Well, it didn't work yet (it gave errors in dmesg like "read: chip lockup? dmasz 65536 fragsz 64 count 0 hwptr 0 swptr 0", but a after another reboot it did. So apparently you should then run /usr/bin/aumix and you will be OK.

CDROM I've only used it as a CDROM.
Power Management Supports ACPI, Linux driver appears to detect the support, haven't tried going any further.

I also have a Click! drive and a Linksys WPC11 wireless card, both of which work out of the box with RedHat 7.2.


Greg Lindahl
lindahl@pbm.com
Last Updated: Jan 4, 2002