5. What We Couldn't Test

Linux supports the Ricoh R5C8xx series chipsets as of kernel version 2.6.17, and in fact, the multi-card reader controllers were correctly identified by the operating system. We had no SD or MMC cards available for testing, so we couldn't verify that they actually work, but the drivers are present, they recognize the hardware, and other users report good results.

For MMC cards, support arrived in the 2.6.17-rc1 kernel; this site is the home of that Linux driver development. According to the site, the SD driver framework has been audited and made available with kernel 2.6.18-rc1 for those daring enough to try it out. What reportedly does not yet work is the xD-Picture card reader, also still unverified.

PCMCIA, Firewire, and USB controllers have already proven to work well, as do the wired and wireless network controllers. Without a workable land-line - we gave ours up last year - we also had no way to test the modem capability. This is a long-standing and well-understood feature in Linux (and on HP notebooks) so we would put this to the test in a hotel room on the road without a second thought.

What Remained Unresolved

At the end of our Linux installation and the subsequent test drive, a few outstanding items still remained to be resolved:

HP QuickPlay functionality HP webcam with microphone HP Lightscribe technology

Figure 5: QuickPlay keys on display; a Linux boot is still required to use them.

QuickPlay is a nice feature that enables DVD playback without having to power up and load the operating system, which is normally Windows, but in this case is of course Linux. One report on the Internet indicated that QuickPlay may work with Linux on a separate partition from the original Windows installation - exactly how this laptop was configured for our test. However, this proved incorrect, as the QuickPlay buttons only served to immediately launch into the boot loader before proceeding to boot the default operating system choice. Perhaps there is a simple work-around for this, but if so, we couldn't puzzle it out ourselves.

Searching online forums, personal Web pages, and technical support sites turned up very little verifiable information about Linux support for Lightscribe technology. In short, it does not currently appear to be supported, either in driver software or applications that use them, such as Nero for Linux. Though it's a seemingly minor loss of functionality, this is apparently one sacrifice that Linux users of the HP dv1000 must be prepared for.

The same could also be said for the webcam and microphone, one (or both) of which may be reported as the yet-to-be-identified "unknown device" in the list PCI command (lspci -b) in the screenshot below. For now, unless someone knows of a feasible solution, this is another sacrifice that must be made.

Figure 6: Unrecognized devices show up as unknown in the list PCI command output.

Equally unfortunately, some time during the post-installation upgrade process, audio ceased to function for no apparent reason. While not entirely uncommon for the Linux software upgrade process on laptops - even with a good Linux distribution using its own validated package repositories - this can create problems for workstation and server installations as well. Fortunately, the frequency of such events is not so common, nor are the results always effectively crippling as in this case, but they do present unnecessary and untimely problems for certain usage patterns. Were this a work notebook and one not clearly designed for multimedia uses, this might just be considered a minor annoyance. As it was, because the sound worked at one point, we assumed that with sufficient effort and elbow grease we could get it working again, though we did not look forward to the dubious pleasures of that exercise.

Even though the display looked great with an incorrect profile, getting things absolutely right requires manual fiddling with configuration files that to a novice Linux user might seem like dabbling in black magic. For that reason, it wasn't considered a loss from an installation perspective, but loses out in terms of user friendliness when it comes to configuring the graphical display subsystem to properly utilize the WXGA capabilities. Here again, we knew we could have worked our way through that exercise, having done it many times before, but also skipped it to save time and effort. While this might make an excellent subject for another story, we found the resulting notebook quite usable enough without tweaking the graphics profile to its optimal state.