Small Dropbear

December 30, 2006 No Comments

Debian GNU/Linux on Compaq nx6320

Last updated: 30 December 2006

General Hardware Specifications of Compaq nx6320:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Intel Core Duo, 2GHz	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
1024×768 15″ TFT Display	Works	Select Generic LCD Display in Installer
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950	Works	Used Standard Xorg drivers
2GB, DDR2	Works	No special procedure required during installation
100 GB SATA Hard Drive	Works	Requires recent kernel, eg 2.6.18 for driver
10/100/1000 Integrated Network Card	Works	Installer found the Tigon driver for it fine
24X Max Variable CD-ROM Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Internal Intel Wireless Networking	Works	Need to download specific driver, see below.
59 WHr Lithium-Ion Battery	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Intel 82801G Sound Card	Works	Used ALSA driver snd_hda_intel

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.18

Basic Installation of debian:

I used Debian Etch RC3 as I wanted to test the installer and also get Linux on a small partition of this laptop. It is only used for network testing and as a remote Xserver, so it doesn’t have much installed.

The sarge installer won’t work, the kernel is too old and it will not find your SATA drives.

Setting up additional features for Debian

The wireless port was the trickiest part. You need to install some packages to get it going. Make sure you have contrib and non-free in your apt archives as these drivers are not in main.

Then install ipw3945d, firmware-ipw3945 and the module. The exact name of the module depends on what kernel you have installed. I have kernel from the package linux-image-2.6.18-4-686 so the module package is ipw3945-modules-2.6.18-4-686.

Nothing else needed to be done, no other module packages are required. It started off kinda weird but a depmod -a and reboot later I had solid link and, once I go my wireless key on, connected fine.