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Product Name	HP Pavilion zv5120us Notebook PC
US Product Number	DZ329U#ABA
Microprocessor	Intel Celeron processor 2.8GHz
Microprocessor Cache	128KB L2 Cache
Memory	1GB+ DDR SDRAM at 333MHz
Memory Max	Maximum Memory 1280MB DDR SDRAM (1 x 256MB, 1 x 1024MB)
Video Graphics	ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 IGP
Video Memory	128MB DDR (shared)
Hard Drive	40GB enhanced-IDE hard disk drive (4200rpm)
Diskette Drive	External USB Floppy Drive available for customers via hpshopping.com or local retailers
Multimedia Drive	DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
Display	15.4 inch WXGA TFT wide viewing angle (1280 x 800) display
Fax/Modem	Integrated v.90/v.92 56KB modem (RJ-11 connector)
Network Card	Realtek Integrated 10/100BASE-T Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 connector)
Wireless Connectivity	54g Integrated 802.11 b/g Wireless LAN
Sound	16-bit Sound Blaster Pro-compatible audio; internal Harman Kardon speakers; AC audio link; volume control button and mute button

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Pentium Celeron 2.8 mghz	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
15.4 SXGA+ TFT Display	Works	Set 1280x800 3D enabled during installation.
ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 IGP	Works	Supported in the distro.  Set 1280x800 3D enabled during installation.
1 GB SDRAM, 2DIMMs	Works	No special procedure required during installation
40 GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Modular Floppy Drive	N/A	No floppy on this machine
Realtek Integrated Network Card	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Internal 56k Modem	Works	No special procedure required during installation
24X Max Variable CD-RW Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Integrated Broadcom BCM4306 PCI	Works*	Using Linuxant Driverloader ($20) and Windows driver.  HP Windows driver does not work.  Used INF file from HP, BCM4306.SYS from Linksys.
Lithium-Ion Battery	Works	No special procedure required during installation
Sound Card  ADI 1981B Audio	Works	No special procedure required during installation

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6, Suse 9.3 Professional latest release

• I have tried many different distributions of Linux trying to get everything to work.  Mandriva 10.3, Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Suse all work extremely well except for the wireless lan, which is a must to work for me.  I tried numerous PCMCIA cards which are supposedly "supported" in Linux without success natively.  I tried NDISWRAPPER, and got the built in Broadcom card to work temporarily but could not reproduce the result after reboot or reinstallation of the OS.
• Note that Suse 9.3 Professional is a retail product and is not cheap!  However, I got copies of the 5 cd's on Amazon for a nominal fee under the GPL (shipping and handling).

• Other than the wireless issue, there were no issues that did not resolve themselves without user intervention.  Even the scrolling feature on the Alps Glidepoint Touchpad worked "out-of-the-box."

• None.  It should be noted that wireless is a mess under any distro.  The vendors do not provide Linux drivers, the pcmcia cards which are supported natively are hard to find old 802.11b cards.  There are two ways to attempt resolution - Linuxant Driverloader retail product (www.linuxant.com) or Ndiswrapper (included in modern distros).
• It does appear that the card occassionally gets confused as to whether it is connected or not.  For example, after 5 minutes of non-use, the browser will hang.  Simply turning off the button that controls wifi above the keyboard and turning it back on and re-establishing the connection via the Administration applet on the taskbar reconnects it within a few seconds.  On the other hand, it also stayed connected overnight, so this seems to be an intermittent minor issue easily worked-around.

• ralph (at) shoemakerr (dot) com

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