Installing Breezy on HP Pavilion zv6000 (& NTFS problems)

[Gian Piero Carzino]

This is the story (first part: see at end) of an installation on a
(quite handsome) AMD 64 based notebook.

I am writing this to help other people to avoid long trial and error
experiences.

First of all, making it boot: you need some parameter, otherwise the
installation CD simply won't start (this may happen sometimes with
notebooks). It goes black screen and everything freezes.
In my case neither "vga=771" nor "noapic nolapic" alone would make the
point, but I had to use both at a time.

The second point was more terrifying, as it happened something I still
cannot completely track down: I decided to leave a little partition with
the (preloaded) O.S... a NTFS partition, you know.
This is mainly because BIOS upgrade are unfortunately released often
only in windows executable format.

There must have been something wrong with the NTFS partition, because
ntfsresize (a program that is called by the partitoning dialog) was not
able to do its work.
The problem is that the error message was terse: a line about a cluster
been incoherent, or something.
I tried defragmenting the HD, rebooting windows, no complains! The O.S.
looked like running happily, but there were no way to make linux even
see how much space was used in the NTFS partition, let alone resizing it.
I even loaded a Knoppix, just to see if the HD was visible at all.
Than, at 04:00 I found a tiny rescue distribution (RIP) which has the
newest version of ntfsresize, and that one told me the hint:

from windows you must run "chkdsk /f" and reboot twice

This odd procedure made the trick, and from that moment on, the
partitioning dialog began to work.

Everything went smooth, as most hardware were correctly detected.

But at the moment of starting X, it couldn't.

The ATI video card was detected. The correct ati driver from xorg
selected, but no way.
Appearently the monitor was not recognized (apart from the resolution of
1280x800) nor even for the fact of being a LCD.

Mangling with "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" was of no help, because
the monitor section (which usually saves me on notebooks, giving in
"Medium level" the resolution at freq as found in windows or knoppix)
doesn't have a 1280x800 entry.

At the end I managed to see the relaxing colors of ubuntu (but blurred,
as they are in emulation, and not in native resolution) changing the
driver from "ati" to "vesa", but this is not the final solution, as I
will eventually load the ATI proprietary driver
(fglrx64_6_8_0-8.20.8-1.x86_64.rpm as mentioned in some other lists)
when I will solve the dipendencies of the rpm package...

But that is another story, as I can't go to bed at dawn every night.

-- 
Gian Piero Carzino
<gcarzino at tiscali.it>