mikas blog

Thanks to Michael Hammer I had the possibility to test grml on a HP Compaq dc7700 Convertible Minitower today. As the box seems to be widely used at TU Graz and there’s not that much information available yet I’m feeding google.

My testing system was of course the grml live-cd using the current stable version grml 0.9 featuring kernel 2.6.18-grml and X.org 7.1.1 and grml’s current develrelease (known as 0.9-1) providing the bleeding edge stable kernel 2.6.19-grml.

The box has ‘Intel® Pentium® D processor 915 dual-core 2.80 GHz 4 MB (2 MB per core) L2 cache 800 MHz front side bus with Extended Memory 64-bit Technology’ inside with a graphic card type ‘Hewlett-Packard Company Integrated Graphics Controller’ known as ‘Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Integrated Graphics Controller’ and provides as network device the ‘Hewlett-Packard Company Ethernet controller’ known as ‘Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection’.

Important: vesa framebuffer does not work (at least not with 2.6.18 and 2.6.19) so you have to boot using vga=normal (known as ‘nofb’ bootoption at grml). And the BIOS seems to be horrible broken, therefore you have to use acpi=off or pci=nommconfig. So boot your grml box using:

nofb acpi=off

or

nofb pci=nommconfig

Booting works fine then. Network and sound work stright out of the box. By default running grml-x will use the vesa module. You might want to use the i810 module instead, so run ‘grml-x -module i810 wm-ng’. Depending of your setup you might want to set ‘Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT, DFP"’ in the Device-section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf additionally. That’s it.

Update [2007-01-09]: instead of acpi=off you can try pci=nommconfig as well which should provide a (basically) working ACPI setup without hanging at the mmconfig stuff during bootup. Seems to be a problem of Intel 965 based chipsets…

This entry was posted by mika on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 12:45 and is filed under Computer, Hardware, Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.