Running Gentoo Linux on HP Pavilion dm1-1110ev – Result: Success

May 28, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo, Linux · 20 Comments

To be honest I never though I was that crazy to run Gentoo on a netbook o_0. Oh well, what is done is done :)

I recently purchased a HP Pavilion dm1-1110ev netbook.

First thing to do was to stick a nice Gentoo logo :).

Moving along, since this netbook doesn’t have a cd/dvd rom drive, I used unetbootin to make my usb stick bootable. Using that, I booted up the Gentoo amd64 image and here we are. HP webpage failed ( as usual ) to list the exact hardware specifications so I used lspci to retrieve the hardware information:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07) 00:02.0

VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) 00:02.1

Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) 00:1a.0

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03) 00:1a.7

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1b.0

Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) 00:1c.0

PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03) 00:1c.1

PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03) 00:1d.0

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1d.1

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03) 00:1d.2

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03) 00:1d.3

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03) 00:1d.7

USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03) 00:1e.0

PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93) 00:1f.0

ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2

SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.3

SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.6

Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family)

Thermal Subsystem (rev 03) 02:00.0 Network controller:

Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01) 03:00.0

Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)

Quite unexpected. Seems like the whole hardware is compatible with Linux :)

Since I will use a Phenom II x6 machine to build binary packages for this netbook, I thought it was a good chance to try KDE4 again since as far as I remember it used to work perfectly on my older laptop ( which uses openbox now by the way ). To be honest I got little scared to use openbox here cause I need to make sure that most of the netbook features ( suspend, key maps, hdmi output etc ) will work out of the (DE)box without much scripting/hacking/digging around anyway. However, I am pretty sure I will install openbox on that as well. Anyway…

Surprisingly, KDE4 worked better than I originally expected.

The only thing that didn’t work was the wireless switch so I wasn’t able to switch off my wireless card. Hence I wrote a simple bash script that loads or unloads the atheros modules and putted in on taskbar for quick access. Since loading kernel modules requires root priviledges, I allowed my used to execute that specific command using sudo :)

#!/bin/bash
#check if module is loaded
loaded="$(lsmod|grep -o ^ath[^0-9])"
if [[ "${loaded//[[:space:]]}" == "ath" ]];then
	#modules are loaded so unload them
	rmmod ath9k ath9k_common ath9k_hw ath
else
	#modules are not loaded so load them
	modprobe ath9k
fi
exit 0

and this is the line in /etc/sudoers

hwoarang ALL:NOPASSWD: /home/hwoarang/scripts/atheros

What I haven’t tested yet is the bluetooth and camera support but I can’t say that I really care about them :)

Tags: Gentoo, HP

How to build and use QmlDesigner on Qt-Creator

May 24, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo, Programming · Comment

I must admit that I haven’t took care of qt-creator ebuilds lately and this is because I simply couldn’t test them. I was using Qt-4.6.9999 live ebuilds whilst live qt-creator wanted explicitly Qt-4.7. Yesterday I finally updates my Qt installation to Qt-4.7 and it was about time to start working on qt-creator ebuilds again.

Qt-4.7 now brings Qt-declarative module which allows you to create flexible applications based on QML language. A designer plugin is already implemented on qt-creator in order to help you quickly develop such applications.

Unfortunately, this plugins requires private headers for Qt4 library so I needed to edit qt-{core,gui,script,declarative} ebuilds to install those private headers. Qt upstream inserted a special configure switch to use when you build your Qt4 library (-developer-build) but I decided that rebuilding the whole Qt library for that was too much.

What I did was to introduce a new use flag ‘private-headers‘ on those ebuilds. So if you want to have a fully working qml+designer support on qt-creator do the following:

edit /etc/make.conf and add private-headers use flag on USE variable. Then run

USE=”qml” emerge qt-creator

Before merging qt-creator, portage will rebuild qt-{core,gui,script,declarative} ebuilds in order to have those private headers installed.

Tags: Gentoo, QML, qt

Gentoo Wiki Project: First Meeting on Monday ( 10/5/2010, 2000UTC )

May 6, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo · 3 Comments

This monday ( 10th of May 2010, 2000UTC, #gentoo-wiki@Freenode ) we will gather up to have our very first meeting regarding the progress of this project. Important issues are still unresolved so we need to be as many as possible in order to get this project up and running. Please be there

Tags: Gentoo, meeting, wiki