GNU/Linux on HP Pavilion N5422l

Author : Vincent Deffontaines
Last update of this document : 17 jan 2003

Brief Hardware description

Disclaimer

All informations provided in this document come from author's personnal experience, and may not fit with HP or anyone else's advises or opinions. It is anyway YOUR entire responsability to believe this document or to follow these instructions.

Advice

I recommend you read Adam Kisiel's excellent document about linux on HP N5495, which is near this laptop in many ways.

BIOS

Current BIOS released by HP is dual : it seems 1.08 is for APM support, and 1.07 is ACPI.
1.07 installed here

OS

I installed debian unstable, totally removed windows xp.
Compiled kernel with i830m support.
As mentionned in Adam's document, it certainly is best to always run latest stable kernel for now on this laptop.
Probably running a 2.5 branch kernel is a good idea, due to it containing very improved ACPI support.
I didn't manage to get correct Acpi support on this laptop Linux 2.4 kernel til now.
I will update this page when I switch to 2.5
Sound support is fine, even if initialization of the driver is sometimes strange (I sometimes have to play with volume level to get a left and right correct sound balance)

XFree

XFree from 4.1.99 has support for the i830 chipset.
Driver to use is "i810". It has support for i830 included from 4.1.99 on.
You probably want to install Xfree 4.2 or a later release.

Mouse support

Integrated mouse works fine both under X and console (with GPM), it only works with 2 buttons (no "wheel" support)
PS2 mouse is nicely supported as well

Power management support

I cant seem to have got anything to work with apm. ACPI is the way to go anyway.
ACPI seems to detect my battery model, but seems unable to report the battery load.
Valery Beaud reports these 2 points: ACPI detects fine if system is on AC power or not.
Also, the "halt" and "reboot" commands work fine

I have to investigate further. More news to come !
It is possible to assign some tasks to the "special" keys at the top of the keyboard.
For now all I did was to use the sleep button for energy economy mode : pressing it loads hdparm spinout timeouts and stops network card support.

Your contribution

Please send me an email if you have any information related to this laptop that I forgot - made mistakes about.
I will be pleased to include such information in this document.

Email address

n5422@gryzor.removethis.if.you.dont.send.nasty_spam.com