HP Pavilion dv6780el on Debian Squeeze

ponton — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:07:49 +0000

Recently I bought a laptop HP Pavilion dv6780el. It was shipped with Vista, but was used only once for download Debian Testing snapshot: two horrible hours for searching CD burning program for Windows (this is shareware, this is demo, this is adware, oh, this is freeware, but actually it can’t burn CD image onto DVD disk *sigh*). In the end I copied the image to my old laptop and after 5 minutes I’ve got a CD ready to install.

% lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M GS (rev a1)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 01)
07:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
07:09.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
07:09.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
07:09.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
07:09.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff)

I installed Debian Squeeze amd64 and almost everythinng worked out-of-box, except few things.

Wi-Fi
I had to install binary firmware for Intel 3945 since non-free packages are not in default Debian installation. Fortunately I was able to connect with wire:

sudo aptitude install firmware-iwlwifi

NVIDIA drivers
The default X driver is nv which performance is poor. Again, I had to manually install non-free software. Just googled “nvidia drivers linux” and followed the instructions. The good news is that the quailty of the official NVIDIA drivers for X server is very satisfactionary.

Muting speakers when headphones are plugged-in
This is one I haven’t solved yet. I just mutted the front speakers in ALSA Mixer, but that’s only a workaround.
UPDATE: It works after updating alsa-base to version 1.0.20

ACPI
I noticed that when I tried first time to exhaust the battery it didn’t show any notification like “Low battery level”; it just died out of energy. Maybe it’s just a GNOME setting, dunno.

What I haven’t tested is fax modem and card bus.

The battery works for 2h15m which is quite short time.

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HP Pavilion dv6780el on Debian Squeeze