Compaq Presario (V2305CA) laptop and Ubuntu

[Nathan Howell]

My sister just purchased one of these laptops and, being the smart girl
she is, she wants Ubuntu on it (she will return it if it doesn't work...).
So far, I've installed Hoary and gotten the wireless network running with
ndiswrapper (although the packaged ndiswrapper in hoary was too old, and I
had to build v1.2 to get it going.)

Now, I've got two problems with it at the moment, one very big, one not
quite so big:


1. I can't get DMA working on the hard drive or optical drive. This is
(obviously) a deal-breaker, as hdparm -tT is coming in at ~1.7MB/s. Yes,
1.7. And that's an *improvement.* Initially, it was around 450KB/s. Ow.
Here's some details:

#sudo hdparm -i /dev/hda
 Model=TOSHIBA MK6025GAS, FwRev=KA201A, SerialNo=659O5342S
 Config={ Fixed }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=48
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=117210240
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
 DMA modes:  sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
 AdvancedPM=yes: unknown setting WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: device does not report version:

#sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
 using_dma    =  0 (off)

Nothing useful in the logs.


2. Video performance is also terrible. The laptop has an ATI Radeon Xpress
200M, and I have to use the NoAccel option to even get Gnome to start. The
fglrx driver doesn't even support this chip. Do I have any options to get
livable video performance on this machine? Right now dragging a window is
a painful experience.


And for good measure, the output of lspci -v is here:
http://atdot.ca/lspci.txt

Anybody have any ideas? Need more info? Anything? Thanks,

Nathan