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

May 28, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo, Linux

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

Comments

20 Responses to “Running Gentoo Linux on HP Pavilion dm1-1110ev – Result: Success”

Cyny on May 28th, 2010 2:22 am

Not to be too picky, but your user probably shouldn’t have write access to a shell script that is allowed to execute as root. Other than that, great post, good to see that some netbooks are well supported.

How are you building the packages, ‘ROOT=”/path/” HOST=”" emerge -av foo’ or a 32bit chroot?
Markos on May 28th, 2010 2:32 am

But I need to load/unload modules quickly. I understand the risks but i am willing to live with that :)

I ‘ve created a 64bit chroot on my Phenom host and I build binary packages there. This chroot has the exact same make.conf as my netbook . I store the binary packages on my webserver and I download them ( via PORTAGE_BINHOST variable on /etc/make.conf ) on my laptop. As I said the chroot is 64bit since Intel Celeron SU2300 supports 64bit :)
Cyny on May 28th, 2010 2:51 am

i guess i was thinking more along the lines of tossing it in /usr/local/bin and making it readonly to non root.

ahh, didn’t know that cpu was 64bit, but still seems like a large waste of space to have a second whole system installed. I wish gentoo handled binpackages, and 32bit libs on 64bit systems better. I may have to resurect my very old laptop and play with a nfsroot again.
hangfire on May 28th, 2010 3:37 am

Call me stupid – why do you need to be able to load/unload the wireless module quickly? Using networkmanager, I can disable wireless with two mouse clicks, all in user-land. I’m sure that similar approaches work with other network manager software. Your approach feels like a complete hack.
ufoman on May 28th, 2010 5:00 am

Gentoo on a netbook is crazy! Personally I have eMachines eM250 (intel atom) and gentoo optimized for atom cpu is a lot snappier than ubuntu :)
Markos on May 28th, 2010 12:03 pm

Cyny: I wouldn’t think is as a waste of space but as a backup for my notbook. If something bad happens I can just pack that chroot and move it to notbook :)

handfire: Yes BUT I need to do some work when I am not on X so no NetworkManager. I use the gentoo network scripts to handle my network :) I could also map that script to the wireless switch button but it doen’t get recognized at all ( not xev output )
Markos on May 28th, 2010 7:52 pm

FYI, cpufreq doesn’t work for this processor

I already opened a bug upstream
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16072

and one ( as a monitor tracker ) on our bugzilla
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321853
Aravanis Konstantinos on May 29th, 2010 2:16 am

You forgot to unstick the windows logo! :P
Antonis on May 29th, 2010 3:05 am

You have too much free time.
Markos on May 29th, 2010 2:10 pm

@Konstantinos
But it is pretty :)

@Antonis
So? Wanna some? :)
Nathan Zachary on May 31st, 2010 11:39 pm

I have Gentoo on my netbook as well, and have since day 1. I actually do all the compiling on the netbook itself though.
nick on June 9th, 2010 8:01 am

please tell me where you got the gentoo sticker?
Apopas on June 9th, 2010 9:56 am

I never find hardware reviews with Gentoo, still this is the only revbiew for that piece I’ ve found around and it runs Gentoo :D

I’m interested to buy this netbook. What about the battery life my friend?

thank you
Markos on June 9th, 2010 12:30 pm

@nick
A friend of mine gave it to me. He just found a logo over the inet and the he printed it out :)

@Apopas

Well, it is about 5 hours with normal usage. Note that cpufreq doesn’t work on this machine due to kernel issues so the CPU clock is stuck on 1200Mhz. I ‘ve never used Windows with it so I can compare the performance.
Apopas on June 9th, 2010 3:31 pm

5 hours huh? Hmmm not bad. I have the 1030SV 10″ and it lasts about 6 hours, so one hour less with larger monitor and better specs is normal, correct?

PS: Who cares for windows? :P
Markos on June 10th, 2010 2:10 pm

Nobody but still the missing cpufreq support in linux kernel is quite annoying :(
Apopas on June 13th, 2010 1:51 pm

Maybe we are lucky with 2.6.35 :)
Markos on June 13th, 2010 3:02 pm

Well, they haven’t touched the upstream bug yet. Lets see …
Apopas on June 14th, 2010 10:00 am

Maybe we are lucky with 2.6.38 then :P
Apopas on June 18th, 2010 12:37 pm

I bought it as well but installed Ubuntu. It’s a neat piece of hardware and everything works fine but the touch scrolling :(