Compaq Presario (V2305CA) laptop and Ubuntu

[Nathan Howell]

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:09:26 +0200, Max Andersen wrote:

> Nathan Howell wrote:
> 
>>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.)

Turns out ndiswrapper 1.1 in breezy also works fine.


[snip dma not working details]
> 
> Seems orlandu has a solution here. try it out:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-30949.html

Thanks, that led me to more potential solutions to try, but none of them
worked. As a last option, I dist-upgraded to breezy and it worked.
Apparently the new atiixp module is a lot better. Transfer rate is still
down around 12MB/s, but I'm not really sure how fast this drive is
supposed to be, since it's a 4200RPM laptop drive.


>>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.

The video performance is livable now, but barely. And I've discovered a
new video problem that is a deal-breaker. If any app tries to use xvideo,
X crashes.

I've tried to use the vesa driver too, but X won't even load. It complains
about not finding a valid mode and dies.


Other issues:

- The newest powernowd (0.96) doesn't work on the Sempron 3000+ in this
machine. The older version (0.90) does work.

- The processor monitor applet always show the cpu at 50% utilization,
even when nothing is happening.

- Sometimes, the boot process will just stop at various points. Pressing a
key or clicking the mouse button will get it going again. Strange.


I'm reluctant to file bugs on these, since my sister hasn't yet decided
whether to keep the laptop. I don't really want to file bugs and then lose
the hardware to check them again.

Nathan