Slackware Linux Installation on the HP Pavilion zv5120us

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Revision 0.4
Copyright © 2010 by Zack Smith
All rights reserved.

Summary

With care, this old laptop can be made into a decent Linux laptop.

Introduction

Most everything that I've tried, including wireless and the ATI video driver, work.

My zv5120us

The following is some useful data on my system obtained from /proc/cpuinfo, lspci, the manual, etc.

Item	Characteristics	Status
Processor	Intel Celeron 2.8 GHz	Works.
64-bit?	No	N/A
Level 1 Cache	16 kB L1?	Works.
Level 2 Cache	128 kB L2	Works.
RAM	1280 MB	Works.
Buses	ISA, PCI	Works.
Hard Drive	80 GB	Works.
CD-ROM	Installed my own DVD writer	Works.
Screen	15.4 inch color, active TFT	Works.
Video Processor	ATI Radeon 9100	Works accelerated.
Video RAM	Shared	Works.
Video Resolution (LCD)	1280x800	Works.
Sound Hardware	AC97-compliant	Works.
USB	Two of them	Works, but is slow.
Other ports	USB, Parallel, PCMCIA, PS/2, video	Not tested.
Trackpad	Yes	Works.
PCMCIA CardBus compatibility	?	Not tested.
PCMCIA Controller	?	Not tested.
Battery Type	?	Works.
Weight (PC)	without battery: ?	N/A
Weight (AC adaptor)	?	N/A
AC Adaptor Output	?	N/A
Modem	?	Not tested.

Why this distro?

I always use Slackware, because I have also found it to be reliably put together and rationally organized. Slackware is slightly different than other distros in that the emphasis is still as much on the command line as it is on X-Windows.

I also attempted to get Gentoo working on this laptop, but with no success. The version of the Linux kernel that it came with resisted recognizing the hard drive, whereas Slackware had no problem at all.

Installation

The 80 GB hard drive offers more than enough space for most Linux activities.

The Procedure

Boot from the 32-bit Slackare 13 DVD, log in, run fdisk, and then run setup.

Getting things working

X-Windows

In your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, it is important to specify the "ati" driver because the default "vesa" driver is unbearably slow.

Framebuffer

Not tried yet.

Audio

Audio is AC97 compliant and works just fine.

PCMCIA

Not tried.

Wireless

Wireless can be made to work, however Broadcom has made getting it to work particularly difficult: It requires that you obtain the Windows driver file, which is available online, on which you will run a utility to extract the core firmware files. You must then copy those into your /lib/firmware directory and enable the open source Broadcom driver.

B43 driver

Performance

Processor

The Celeron 2.8 GHz is overall not a super-fast processor, for the simple reason that although it is stunningly fast internally, and its Level 1 cache runs at full tilt, its Level 2 cache is very small and very slow and the main memory is also very slow.

Therefore, if you have programs that work on small chunks of data very intensely then they may run fast on this computer. Other software will be sluggish.

Running the Dhrystone2 test that you can find at anime.net/~goemon it gets a score of ?.

Memory Bandwidth

To measure memory performance, I wrote a utility called "bandwidth". Here is the graphical output:

Click to embiggen:

Hard drive

I am using the stock 80 GB drive. Running hdparm to perform a simple test of its performance, I got these results:

 
Buffer disk access:  MB/sec
Cached disk access:  MB/sec

Documentation

At the HP site.

Links

Software
- FramebufferUI (FBUI): My in-kernel windowing system for Linux.
- Bandwidth: My C-based benchmark to measure memory bandwidth.
- Maxilla: My OpenGL-based VRML viewer for Windows.
- bmplib: My library for creating BMP image files.
- C@: My experimental language and compiler.
- Lapis: my tiny web server with built-in stack-based scripting language.
- Muvy: My video editor for Windows.
- FrugalWidgets: my widget set (defunct).
Documentation