Installing Kubuntu-AMD64 Breezy on a
Compaq Presario R3000 Laptop
(model R3190US)

UPDATED: November 22, 2005


WARNING!

Any steps described here are to be carried out at YOUR OWN RISK! I believe them to be safe, and have tested them on my own laptop. If your computer breaks, you get to keep the pieces. Please read through the entire document before doing anything to your hardware.

Introduction

This webpage is an overview of the steps necessary to install Kubuntu Breezy on a very nice (and reasonably priced) Athlon64 laptop- the Compaq Presario R3000 series. This page used to contain a ton of (now obsolete) info about installing the 64bit port of Debian (Debian-amd64). The past year has made linux installation almost trivial. You can still access the old page here. Here is an overview of the hardware for my specific model (R3190US):

The Plan

I am a graduate student, and this laptop belongs to my advisor's research group. Because someone else may inherit this laptop in the future, I have decided to make it a dual-boot system (with Windoze XP Home). This will allow for easy BIOS updates, etc, and give future users of the machine more options.

Beating Windows Into the Corner

The first step to setting up a dual-boot system (without reinstalling Windows) is to shrink the NTFS partition. The best tool to use for this is "ntfsresize", which is conveniently used by the parted program. I highly recommend using the latest Knoppix CD (at least 4.0.2) for this task. Here are the steps:
  1. Boot into windows and download knoppix
  2. Burn image to a CD
  3. Make sure that the NTFS filesystem is in a consistent state. From a shell run "chkdsk /f" which schedules a filesystem check on the next bootup. Reboot.
  4. After the filesystem check, insert knoppix CD and reboot.
  5. After booting knoppix, run qtparted. This starts up a nice graphical interface where you can resize your NTFS partition. I chose ~17GB for the NTFS partition and left the remainder empty.
  6. After finishing, reboot into windows and let the filesystem check complete (it was scheduled by ntfsresize).
You are now ready to install GNU/Linux. I would highly recommend securing windows a bit first.

Securing Windows

Windows is a piece of garbage as far as I'm concerned, but if you have to have it installed on a computer, it is definitely worthwhile to secure it a bit. I booted up windows on my home network (behind a firewall) and did the following in an attempt to make Windoze suck less:
  1. Disable windows messenger
  2. Enable basic firewall on both network interfaces
  3. Install windows updates
  4. Install Mozilla Firefox, set it as default browser
  5. Install AVG antivirus software
  6. Install Spybot S&D
  7. Install Mozilla Thunderbird
  8. Install OpenOffice, set as default office suite
  9. Install Cygwin

Installing Kubuntu-AMD64 Breezy Badger

I began by downloahere: http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/install-images/sid-amd64-netinst.iso Burn this to a disk, put it in the drive and reboot. At the boot prompt, you need to disable the apic or else you will end up with IRQ conflicts resulting in the ethernet and harddrive being flaky: boot with "linux noapic". Continue with the normal install. Grub may not detect your windows partition- you can add it later. You should also make sure that the "noapic" option gets applied to all kernels. You may find a copy of my menu.lst useful. You should comment out the "splashimage" line, or you can download the splashimage here. This image is a cute picture of baby penguins :-) If you install X, make sure to disable the login servers (xdm, kdm, etc) by commenting out the entry in /etc/X11/default-display-manager. This is a temporary solution until you can get the nvidia and synaptics drivers installed.

Configuration

Here are the hardware details for this machine:
#> lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Host Bridge (rev a4)
0000:00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 LPC Bridge (rev a6)
0000:00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce3 SMBus (rev a4)
0000:00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5)
0000:00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 1.1 (rev a5)
0000:00:02.2 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 USB 2.0 (rev a2)
0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Audio (rev a2)
0000:00:06.1 Modem: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 00d9 (rev a2)
0000:00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation nForce3 IDE (rev a5)
0000:00:0a.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
0000:00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce3 AGP Bridge (rev a4)
0000:00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 440 Go 64M] (rev a3)
0000:02:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (rev 03)
0000:02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device ac54 (rev 01)
0000:02:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device ac54 (rev 01)
0000:02:04.2 System peripheral: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8201 (rev 01)

The Kernel

After the install (or during, in expert mode), install the "amd64-k8" version of the kernel. Everything is fine.

ACPI

ACPI modules are loaded automatically. You can configure acpid to respond to events if you wish. suspend???

PowerNow

Powernowd is installed by default, and the powernow-k8 module gets loaded. You can edit the default behaviour by creating a file (/etc/default/powernowd) that gets sourced by the startup script in /etc/init.d/powernowd.

XOrg

restricted modules package add nvidia to /etc/modules edit xorg.conf

Wireless Networking

My recommedation is to buy a nice cardbus wireless card (I use a Netgear WG511, which is a prism54 based card). The wireless networking in this laptop is provided by a Broadcom chip. Broadcom has basically given the Open Source community the middle finger. Not only will they not release specs, they also will not develop a binary driver. If you really want to use it, you'll need to install ndiswrapper >= 1.2beta, compile a new kernel module, and then download the 64bit windows driver. I have managed to get it to work (kind of), but it causes sporadic crashes and hard lockups of the machine. Note that this wireless chip works much better with the 32bit kernel/driver. Perhaps future versions will be better.

Sound

Works out of the box.

USB

Works out of the box.

IEEE1394 (FireWire)

I have no devices to test, but the controller seems supported, so I would imagine everything works fine...

PCMCIA

PCMCIA/Cardbus cards work fine, but you need to tell the cardservices about the PCI bridge on this machine. You need to add extra memory and IO ranges to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts PCMCIA currently works with 16-bit (ISA) cards. You need to add an extra memory and IO range to your /etc/pcmcia/config.opts. You can get mine here. Also, if you want to use any orinoco_cs cards you'll have to download at least version 0.15rc1, which fixes a problem with 64bit kernels. Several people are currently working on getting cardbus support functioning. I believe it will be possible, just have to hack at it a bit...

S-Video

Not tested.

Flash Media Reader

This device is unsupported.

Modem

The modem is an Agere/Lucent winmodem. There may be drivers available for it, but I have not tested it yet, as I don't really need it...

Useful Links


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