A while ago I bought an HP Pavillion 7830, with Windows Me
preinstalled (WinXP hadn't come out yet). I quickly installed Debian
2.2 Linux on it, and have some pieces of advice if you want to do the
same. People complain about the lack of a decent desktop on Linux,
but I think that's a relatively unimportant issue. For me the real
trouble is with device drivers. HP are among those who promote Linux,
yet here they come out with a product that has many unsupported
devices. Apart from that, I find the HP Pavillion offers good
value. It's one of the few pre-built computers that comes with an
Ethernet card. I'm surprised that in the age of DSL so many computers
from top vendors have only a modem, no Ethernet.
So on with the
pieces of advice:
Linux, and Debian, have come a long way here. In 1997, my first acquaintance with Linux, it took me a week to have X11 (X Window System) up and running. Debian 2.2 now sports a program called XF86Setup that makes installation a breeze. Make sure you install it. You should also install the SVGA X server, which is the one that goes best with the Nvidia Vanta card on the Pavillion. During the configuration you can have memory autodetected but it's easier to say the card has 16 MB.
Mouse configuration under XF86Setup is easy but tedious, and it depends on whether or not you have mouse enabled for text terminal (install the gpm program). If you do have it, your mouse will probably be autoconfigured. If not, you'll just have to try different alternatives. For me, IntelliMouse on /dev/gpmdata works fine. If you don't see /dev/gpmdata enabled try also /dev/psaux or /dev/mouse.
The Pavillion comes with a Realtek 8139 card. Drivers for this card are not present in Debian 2.2. They also seem missing from SuSE 8.0 and Red Hat 7.3. Luckily, Donald Becker has written drivers which you can find at http://www.scyld.com/network/.
The instructions there are crystal clear, but there are a few
tweaks needed for the Debian distribution. In the first place, you
need Linux sources. You can install those with dselect by
choosing the packages kernel-headers-## and
kernel-source-##. These packages are installed on
/usr/src/kernel... so you'll have to supplement the
compilation line proposed by the documentation with an include flag
pointing to the place where the kernel headers have been unpacked.
Apart from that the instructions are clear. Once you've installed the
module you should test if it actually communicates with the net.
You need just first to check if there's now a net device: do ifconfig -a and you should get an entry for eth0. If not, do ifconfig eth0 to make sure. If you still get nothing, go back to the driver installation instructions!
Now that you have an eth0, you have to give it an IP address, a netmask and a default gateway (if you want to test Internet browsing instead of just pinging machines).
You can do this with two commands:
ifconfig eth0
your-IP-address netmask your-netmask
up
route add default gw your-gateway
eth0
You'll also need to edit /etc/resolv.conf and add a line
like:
nameserver IP-of-nameserver
for each
of your DNS servers.
We now come to the question: how do I get the driver and its configuration loaded at boot time? You need to put the configuration into files, but here Unix shows its splintered nature. Each distribution of Linux and version of Unix has its own version of configuration files, so I'll give you a recipe specifically for Debian.
You're done with networking. Before you reboot, you also need to
set the Ethernet card driver to autoload. An easy way is adding the
following lines to /etc/init.d/modutils:
insmod
/lib/modules/2.2.17/net/pci-scan.o
insmod
/lib/modules/2.2.17/net/rtl8139.o
And you're now done. Go ahead and reboot to make sure everything's OK. Happy browsing!
The Pavillion comes with a Crystal Audio CS4299 sound card. Here again the drivers are not yet in standard Linux distributions, but you can find them at http://alsa.opensrc.org/. I haven't tried to install them yet. Perhaps some day I will...