linux on pavillion 763

[Jon Buckingham]

I am considering buying a desktop Pavillion 763
with DVD writer.
Has anyone had success installing a linux distro on a 763 and successfully
o written DVDs
o imported video over the firewire interface
o used the sound card successfully
o used X successfully.

I'd hate to spend a load of cash on this and find there's some OEM modification
that is not supported in the linux world.

Please also mention the distro you successfully use.
Thanks!

[Michael Armbrecht]

Hi Jon,

I have the Pavilion 763.uk (don't know exactly how that differs from the 763). I am currently running SuSE 8.1 on it. These are the experiences I had:
- Internal modem is an el-cheapo WinModem and does not work with Linux (tried Debian and SuSE).
- Sound (AC97) working with SuSE
- ATI Radeon working with SuSE, but 3d extensions seem to do not
- DVD Writer recognised by SuSE, burning CDs works, I haven't tried burning DVDs yet, as writables are ridiculously expensive here in Ireland
- DVD Player recognised by SuSE, but couldn't play any DVDs. That's not a hardware issue, though, just haven't found a proper player software.

The Firewire port and the USB ports are recognised, but I haven't tried Firewire yet (I am not so much a video freak :-)). My digital camera connected to USB was not recognised, but that's a driver issue (camera is Olympus Z220).

Before I tried SuSE, I had Debian 3.0 which had problems with the graphics card (ATI Radeon 9000).

For installing Linux you need software like Partition Magic, because the PC has WinXP pre-installed, occupying the whole disk (except a small FAT partition containing the windows install files) using NTFS (which FIPS can't handle).

Hope this is of help. I am quite happy with the machine and Linux, just the modem story p*ssed me off a bit. I wonder why HP needs to use cheap pseudo-hardware here, proper modems don't cost that much more.

Cheers
Mick

[Jon Buckingham]

For the record, I took the plunge and have successfully got my pavillion 763.uk dual booting with suse 8.1.

o I added another disk drive for linux (didn't want to pay for partition magic)
o I had to slightly change the optical drive configs as per http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/81_ide-scsi.html (this prevented audio CD playing/ripping)
o I had to disable hotplugging in the BIOS (this prevented USB working)
o I never bothered with the modem - I have a cable modem connection.
o My digital camera and dv camcorder both work ok under linux (thought kino is a bit limited, the firewire connection works).
o ATI radeon 9000 card support as stated earlier has no 3G support (yet), but I think that's coming fast. Anyway, it's only a big deal if you want to play games.
o I have not yet tried dvd burning, since dvd+rw support is not in cdrecord (see http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/)