Debian GNU/Linux (testing) on an HP Pavilion DV9410US Last Updated: 14 October 2007 Contents

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Did I warn you to *** Make Vista recovery DVDs ***? Well do it before you start! Don't say I didn't warn you! *** Make Vista recovery DVDs ***. One nice thing about the Vista OS is the Shrink Volume feature, which leaves unallocated space on the hard drive. That unallocated space is perfect to put your Debian OS in. Shrinking info can be found at: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/f2e9a502-e63c-413d-8804-87326ef4f4cc1033.mspx The rest of what you do with Doze is up to you. I found Vista somewhat valuable in confirming that some of my peripherals worked, such as my Wifi card.

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There are many many excellent reasons for Debian, among which the network downloads is very high on my list.   So now that I got a separate partition from Vista, I get my memory stick (at least 512MB) that I pre loaded the Linux installation onto (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.html.en).   In order to get the system to use the memory stick to boot instead of booting into Vista, with your memory stick in the USB port, you can press <esc> at the first part of the machine start-up and choose USB hard drive boot.   That will get you to the Debian install screen.   Follow the installation instructions until you get to the partitioning part (where it asks if you want to use the entire disk).   Choose to the manual choice.   My partition table showed Vista using /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 as unused disk.   Great!   There's my Linux space.   The way I did it (which probably is not optimal) is:

/dev/sda3   Linux   ext3   65G
/dev/sda4   Extended   3GB
/dev/sda5   Swap   3GB   [on extended partition]

Then there is a question about uswsup swap, which I don't have a clue to what it is.   I chose yes because it was default, and it worked with no noticeable adverse affects.   When it got to the part about GRUB, Vista was recognized, so I let GRUB do its magic.

Now comes the weird part...   Upon restarting the laptop, it kept freezing at different places, total lock-up!   After much much research, I located an acceptable answer, put "noapic irqpoll noirqdebug" in the bootup script for grub.   Open /boot/grub/menu.lst and near the bottom of the file there should be some lines similar to:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-5-amd64
root            (hd0,2)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-amd64 root=/dev/sda3 ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-5-amd64

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.18-5-amd64
root            (hd0,2)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-amd64 root=/dev/sda3 noapic irqpoll noirqdebug ro
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-5-amd64

Now reboot, as your system will probably soon lock up.   Since you can quickly get back to the grub file, I also recommend commenting out the Vista recovery partition at /dev/sda2 in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, so your only Vista choice on the GRUB splash is the correct one.

Next challenge was when I tried to use aptitude or apt-get, I kept receiving a message to put in my CD.   So I inserted my memory stick, which had the ISO image on it, but that wouldn't work.   So after many bad words, I checked the apt sources list at /etc/apt/sources.list and there were two lines with deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux... and only the top one was commented out.   So I commented out the second deb cdrom with a #, ran aptitude update, and was back in business.

Now you have a choice to make.   I upgraded to Debian "testing" so I could get more of the latest programs.   I did this before I got the Wifi working, so I'm not sure whether you can be successful with Wifi in the "stable" version, as the Linux kernel version is still at 2.6.18.   Personally I've had very few problems in the testing version, and the ones I did have were usually resolved in a couple of days or less.   So I once again refer you to the giant red warning at the beginning of this page, and then decide if you want to proceed, as you now should have an operating dual boot laptop.

To upgrade to testing you need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list from stable to testing.   Here is my file, which includes the multimedia site, which you may be interested in.

##deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r1 _Etch_ - Official amd64 NETINST Binary-1 20070820-20:16]/ etch contrib main

deb http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/ testing main contrib
deb-src http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/ testing main contrib

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main
deb-src http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib

# aptitude update
then
# aptitude safe-upgrade

This will leave you with an upgraded system, and a problem waiting to happen.   For some reason (I'm not a GRUB aficionado) the upgrade took out the "noapic irqpoll noirqdebug", completely out of the menu.lst file.   So go back and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and put "noapic irqpoll noirqdebug" in the top kernel.

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Wifi OOOOOOOOOh yeah!

I didn't use Jimbo7's driver, as I wanted to get as close as possible to the correct driver.   I also didn't use the Vista drivers, as more than a few sites warned that Vista wouldn't work, but XP would.   I found the drivers on the HP site at: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-53245-1&lc=en&cc=sg&dlc=en&product=3439687&os=228&lang=en , which should download sp36684.exe. I have it here in case HP screws up their site.   If you use the HP drivers, you will need to extract them; no big deal.
# aptitude install cabextract
Now go to the directory you made (per Jimbo7) where you downloaded sp36684.exe to and execute:
# cabextract sp36684.exe
This will extract the bcmwl5.inf file and .sys files needed.
# ndiswrapper -i /<directoy_files_are_in >/bcmwl5.inf

Before you proceed to "Install the Driver", I had a very large problem with my modules that needed to be fixed, and you may also have the problem!!!

Check the output of # lsmod.   If you have any of the modules listed below, the ones after the word "blacklist", ndiswrapper will probably not work!   This caused me hours of grief.   I figured out after a while to blacklist the bcm43xx module (native Linux driver), but it took me finally noticing that the other listed modules depended on bcm43xx, to reach that d'oh moment, and blacklist all of them.   To blacklist your modules, add the output below to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

## replaced by ndiswrapper
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist i2c_nforce2
blacklist i2c_core
blacklist firmware_class
blacklist ieee80211softmac
blacklist ieee80211_crypt
blacklist ieee80211

Jimbo7 advises # apt-get install wpa-supplicant, but I had to remove the hyphen and use wpasupplicant.   I chose to download more files also to ensure dhcp would also work.
# aptitude install wpasupplicant dhcp3-client libengine-pkcs11-openssl guessnet iproute wireless-tools
Honestly it's been a few days since I downloaded these files, and I don't remember what they are all for, but those are the ones that I downloaded.

If you are interested in a start-up script, it will take a little work, and could be a security hazard.   The thing is that no one besides me uses my laptop, so I figured my personal risks were minimal.   Here's the script, but be sure to complete below also.

#!/bin/sh
sudo ifdown eth0

sudo wpa_supplicant -wB -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dwext

sudo dhclient wlan0

exit 0

** Warning!!! Do not use this in a critical environment, as it has failed once on me so far.

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DVD

The winner so far seems to be Olge.   I downloaded ogle and ogle-gui, and upon opening the gui from KDE, I pressed the "Open_disc" selection, which shut down the whole program.   I reopened the program, made the same choice, and the second time it worked!   I was experimenting with the command line portion of olge, attempting to get it to play the backup copy of a DVD that I made on my hard drive, and it failed to work, and also apparently changed the file at /etc/olgerc.   The default audio was changed from alsa to oss, killing the application every time at startup.   A good way to track down some problems with olge is to start it in a terminal as a regular user with the command ogle --debug, which outputs a lot of useful information.

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Webcam Support

Excellent page for the video portion, but I still fell short in the audio.   I installed the three programs, aptitude install linux-uvc-tools libpt-plugins-v4l2 linux-uvc-source, then used the module assistant as instructed m-a a-i linux-uvc.   Everything appeared to go smoothly.   I got the new modules, videodev, uvcvideo, v4l1_compat, v4l2_common according to lsmod.   Then I installed Ekiga, aptitude install ekiga without problems.   I fired Ekiga up, configured it and had no luck!   But the article explained that the webcam had to be started in Windows before it would work in Linux.   Not a big problem, rebooted into Vista.   I used the trial version of Muvee[sp?], in the all programs section, got the webcam working and closed Vista.   Got back to Linux, fired up Ekiga, and sure enough, the bright blue webcam light came on, and the webcam worked!

Got problems with the audio portion though...   During the set up of Ekiga, I received two messages about failing to open the device.   "Impossible to open the selected audio device (HDA NVidia) for recording.   Please check your audio setup, the permissions and that the device is not busy."

More to follow later.

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Aircard Support (Verizon)

I'm not sure if it is mandatory to initialize this device with Windows, but I read in a couple of places that it was.   I initially set it up in Windows, then switched to my Debian OS and did the following:

# aptitude install pppd

Set up a driver:

Append to /etc/modules (so it will remain during future starts of your machine)

usbserial vendor=0x106c product=0x3711

xxxxxxxxxx = phone number issued by Verizon

Append to /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com    *       vzw

Create the following files:

ttyACM0
115200
debug
noauth
defaultroute
usepeerdns
user xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com
show-password
crtscts
lock
lcp-echo-failure 4
lcp-echo-interval 65535
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -t3 -f /etc/ppp/peers/verizon_chat'

ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'BUSY'
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
'' 'ATZ'
OK ATDT#777
CONNECT \d\c

Now open a second terminal so you can see it while you enter a command in the original terminal.

% tail -f /var/log/messages

In the original terminal enter:

# pppd call verizon

In the second terminal some lines should scroll onto the screen, with one line containing "local IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX" with the IP address following on the same line. (i.e. 75.215.228.201)

In the original terminal enter:

# route add default gw XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

You should now be connected to the internet through ppp0, which can be verified using ifconfig.   Below is a perl script I made to load the programs above automatically.   I used it with an icon on my desktop so I can connect with one double click.   Feel free to use it as you see fit.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
`sudo pppd call verizon`;
my $ip = '';
sleep 5;
&ip;
chomp $ip;
print":$ip:\n\n";
`sudo route add default gw $ip`;
exit 0;
sub ip{
my @tail = `sudo tail /var/log/messages`;
foreach my $line (@tail){
if($line =~ 'local  IP address'){
my @sp = split('address ', $line);
$ip = $sp[1];
if(!$ip){&ip;}
}}}

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