HP Pavilion ze5500

This install is written specifically with a HP Pavilion ze5570 notebook, however all notebooks in the series have pretty much the same hardware. Manufactured in 2003 and 2004, the Pavilion 5500 series are older computers but with some lovin' can do pretty well. It's got a Pentium 4 so it's able to run Arch i686 (50786 chip technically but really i686).

Specifications

Hardware	Description
Processor	Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor 2.66
Memory	448 MB
Video	ATi Mobility Radeon IGP 345M, 64MB Shared memory.
Hard Drive	Fujitsu MHT2060A ATA 60GB
CD Drive	Samsung SN-324F CDRW/DVD
Ethernet	National Semiconductor DP83815 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet Controller
Wireless	Broadcom BCM4306 802.11 b/g
Sound	Sound Blaster Pro-compatible 16-bit
Trackpad	Synaptics with dedicated vertical scroll
Display	13.3 inch XGA TFT (1024x769)

Likes/Dislikes

What I like:

• Video processor for being seven years old can still do most of what I want.
• Battery life is good, I'm guessing about four hours.
• Screen brightness, not quite of today's values but definitely has a good brightness.
• Touchpad has a button for disabling/enabling... nice.
• Disk drive - Using JFS works great and new hard drive. Also editing swap values helped out a bit.

What I dislike

• Heavy - not quite like those old cell-phones though :).
• Legacy power management.
• Compositing with the open-source driver still needs work.

What doesn't work

Everything pretty much works with little or no configuration. The wireless network card will require special firmware but everything else pretty much works, and there are a few other exceptions:

• Suspend to RAM: Fail. Legacy ACPI, so forget it. Hibernate, fortunately, does work.
• Multimedia keys: Only four of eight register events.
• Other keys: All regular keys work, but not some fn-combos (including numlock).

Multimedia keys

There was once a module (omnibook^AUR) and program (omke^AUR) that could enable multi-media and other keys. However, with the 2.6.32 kernel they no longer function... appear to not be updated anymore.

Network

Ethernet card works just fine out of the box, however to get wireless working you'll need to install Broadcoms' firmware (b43-firmware-legacy^AUR).

Touchpad

Touchpad works great. However to get a nice clean setup (i.e. without all the default [and crazy] options pre-set) you'll need a configuration. Here is a full-optioned one.

Video

See ATI.

Suspend

Broke (Suspend to RAM) and... probably will never be fixed. Tried every pm-utils option I could think of, and all different modes of s2ram. Hibernate does run well though, just put resume=/dev/your-swap-partition in your /boot/grub/menu.lst and rebuild the kernel RAM disk (initrd) with the resume hook. Also for my USB network card to resume following hibernation I had to suspend the USB 1.0 module before hibernating:

echo 'SUSPEND_MODULES="button uhci_hcd"' >> /etc/pm/config.d/config

ACPID and CPU Frequency Scaling

To Do.

Haven't bothered with ACPID as KDE 4 has it's own event detection implementation. Haven't got a chance to install CPU Frequency utilities.

Post Install Thoughts

Good computer, maybe though KDE 4 might not be right for it. It does ok but with the disk just crashed on there, it can have some bad hiccups at times. I think it might actually be OK if I put more RAM in it (448MB just isn't enough for KDE) will have to see, or if I could find a way to lower system disk I/O amount (to allow better balance of system parts). Nonetheless, liking it does ok, liking it very much.