So – I bought an HP dv2120us (aka “dv2000” series) laptop. Relevant specs:

• AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-52 (1.6GHz)
• 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM
• 120GB hard drive
• Double-layer DVD±R/RW SuperMulti drive with LightScribe
• 14.1" WXGA high-definition widescreen display (BrightView)
• NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 graphics
• 802.11b/g wireless LAN
• 5-in-1 digital media card reader
• ExpressCard/54 slot

I threw the soon to be released Debian etch (AMD 64-bit RC 2 installer) on it. The short version – with a minor amount of fiddling, this is a SMOKING debian box. Gorgeous screen, great wireless (with ndiswrapper installed) and nice all around.

Installation

ntfsresize refused to resize the windows partition because of supposed errors. I booted to windows, ran checkdisk and ntfsresize was happy after a successful scan and a couple reboots.

Otherwise, the built-in wired ethernet was recognized and installation went as smoothly as can be expected.

Video

I’m running the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the screen is absolutely gorgeous. I’m surprised, as this is a less than $1000 laptop. With the non-free repositories and the 2.6.18-3-amd64 kernel image, installing the nvidia kernel is very easy. Native resolution is 1280 × 800.

aptitude install nvidia-kernel-2.6.18-3-amd64

Here’s my xorg.conf.

Network

I was not happy about the “ExpressCard” slot – meaning NOT PCMCIA. Barf. I was going to use my Atmel PCMCIA wireless card, but it’s not an option. So I decided to bite the bullet and get ndiswrapper set up, as it would appear there are no free drivers for the built in b/g wireless card.

Installing ndiswrapper is very easy on modern Debian systems, and is described adequately here.

lspci told me:

dv2000:/home/dan# lspci | grep -i broad 01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)

so I went to the ndiswrapper wiki and searched for “1390”. I downloaded the AMD 64-bit HP SoftPaq 33008 and used cabextract to get the guts out, installed the .inf and wrote the config out to /etc/modprobe.d/ via the following commands:

cabextract sp34152.exe sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf sudo ndiswrapper -m sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

And add “ndiswrapper” to /etc/modules so you load the module at boot. Wireless networking works perfectly. No dropped connections, excellent range and speed and I couldn’t be happier with it.

Sound

Worked perfectly out the box. No problems.

Other stuff

• The synaptics touchpad works perfectly.
• Hardware monitoring – plenty of info under /proc/acpi, so it looks like all the ACPI hardware stuff (CPU temp, fan speed, etc.) is working nicely.
• Special Keys – They seem to mostly work, I think a lot of the functionality is implemented at the hardware level.
• We’ve got dual CPUs under /proc/cpuinfo. Nice.
• 32-bit crap – I installed a 32-bit etch chroot as described here , skipping all the mplayer compilation stuff. This allows you to run a 32-bit firefox with flashplayer and other proprietary 32-bit apps like Acrobat Reader. You can also run mplayer with win32codecs and libdvdcss2 from debian-multimedia.org .

Not tested

• Webcam. No idea how to get it working and I really don’t care.
• Cardreaders. I haven’t tested them, but etch on another HP machine worked perfectly with them right off.
• Suspend/hibernate. I don’t use it a whole lot, but I’ll probably fiddle with it at some point.

Bottom line

Nice system! Very pretty screen, dirt cheap, fast as all hell with the AMD64-bit kernel and all the stuff I care about – video, networking and sound – works perfectly.

Debian etch is an excellent choice for this machine – module-assistant makes installing custom modules (nvidia drivers and ndiswrapper/broadcom driver) very easy.