It’s Alive!
Update on my shiny new laptop. I booted up the 2005.1-pre3 amd64 ISO last night, and it booted up fine. It detected the ethernet (although obviously not the wireless), and I did the install with no real issues. Overnight, I built Gnome, again no issues. This morning, I tried to install the ati-drivers to configure X, but they were a no-go. They claimed the XPRESS 200M card was not supported. The vesa driver worked, but only got me 1024×768, not the 1280×768 that the LCD supports.
A bit of googling later, I discovered that the newest version of the ati-drivers (8.14.13) doesn’t support that card. However, there is a version (8.13.4) that *does* support them. Time to downgrade. This time, I made progress. The kernel module loaded (and found the hardware). However, X wouldn’t start, giving no usable error. Back at google, I discovered that people had trouble with hardware acceleration, so I disabled dri and drm, and it worked! I now have X running at the native resolution.
Later on, I’ll set up a page for getting the hardware of this laptop to work. Hopefully, it’ll save others some trouble.
You can set it up at http://tuxmobil.org/compaq.html ?
I’ve been adventuring into gentoo on my new laptop as well (hp pavilion ze2000z with turion processor, similar specs to your notebook). I’ve not tried disabling dri and drm yet so I’m using fbdev. Eh, it works. I don’t plan on doing any gaming on this thing so 3d acceleration isn’t a big deal anyway.
I’m bookmarking your blog in case you make progress that I’m unable to. BTW, have you found a workaround to the fast clock issue when apic is enabled? I’ve read ACPI functions are pretty broken as well.
No workaround for the clock problem yet, that I’ve discovered. As far as I know, tho, the ACPI stuff works fine. I can use powernow to down my clock speed; Suspend works (although resume sometimes doesn’t bring back my screen correctly; I blame the ati-drivers); The battery monitor in gnome works fine.
New ati driver out today, 8.13.6-1. I recommend checking it out. I hacked up an ebuild just to make it install (none of the patches are used) and it appears DRI works. Well, I can’t really test it completely yet as I’m accessing my laptop through the vnc module in xorg (not allowed to have laptop at work), but xorg did start.
As far as the clock issue, I’ve resorted to using noapictimer in my kernel parameters, which appears to disable the apic timer and not all of apic. I’ve been monitorig the clock and it is keeping time with this parameter.