V14 with Mandriva

[bzidler]

On a Novatech V14 laptop purchased with no OS installed, I have decided to put an basic version of Windows XP on a 35Gb partition and use the rest for a decent Linux OS.

The first part was not as easy as I thought. I struggled to make the XP system work correctly. One of the problem is that the CD given with the laptop includes mostly drivers for Vista/Windows 7. And very little information is given about the actual hardware and components used in the laptop. You have to guess. Anyway I managed to have wireless and Ethernet working fine. The sound is still a problem. I left it for now and moved on to the Linux install.

I shrinked the Windows partition and created (with Gparted) 2 partitions for / and /home and a swap partition of 4Gb on the rest of the 250Gb disk. Plugged my Opensuse 11.2 x86_64 in, and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to install it. It failed in a strange manner. First the boot hanged and could not pass the load of some drivers. Apparently it seems to happen sometimes but there is no easy fix. Some options on the boot line allow to go a bit further, but not very far and it crashes anyway. So I tried Centos 5.3 which seemed to start a decent install but had its own problems as well. It was just to prove myself that another distribution could possibly make it, because I did not want Centos/RedHat. So I downloaded Mandriva 2010.0 64bits and this time it could go all the way.

Still 2 things are not yet working and will probably take a while to fix. a) Wireless networking. The rtl8191se driver for Linux is not available as rpm and needs to be compiled. b) The webcam for the V14 is unknown and is not seen by the system. Temporarily (at least I hope), Skype will not use it. For these 2 problems I don't think that the distribution has a particular importance, and they may exist on other distributions such as Fedora, Suse, Mint or Ubuntu. If anyone has some solution for this V14 they are welcome. Ndiswrapper can be one for the wifi driver, but I would prefer a native driver.

Conclusion : Opensuse 11.2 (32 and 64) failed to install, Mandriva was easy and the result is good under KDE. It would be nice to get wireless and camera also recognized and working.

[Lorem-Ipsum]

The only OS's I have managed to get working on everything I have tried them on are Debian based OS's namely Debian and Ubuntu.

I have had good experiences with arch linux but I have never been sucessful with mandriva or opensuse.

I try to stay away from Red Hat based OS's like Fedora and CentOS as I have always found them unstable.

I guess its just down to personal results in the end.

[system7]

I see the V14 laptop is a GMA4500 graphics chip. That makes it Intel G43 chipset.

Modern chipsets are moving toward enabling AHCI drives and 64 bit Memory remapping by default in the bios, but I would look for a device instance ID in XP device manager for unknown devices like wireless and webcams. This is a realtek sound chip, for instance. 10EC is realtek, 0888 means it's ALC888 sound.

http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/4665/deviceinstanceidgv5.jpg

Once you know the 4 digit Vendor and Device ID, Google is your friend for drivers.

[bzidler]

Thanks for the answers. It is interesting and I have tried of course to install the Realtek driver for sound but it was not enough and I messed up this Windows XP so much, that I got fed up with it. I will remove it for good, and reformat this partition in ext4 for Linux. My advice is that now in the damned Windows world the choice should be Windows 7 and nothing else.

On the linux side now, things are at the same level with no webcam and no wireless. The V14 is in fact the Clevo W830T but on the Clevo site they don't give more details than Novatech on the hardware components, and of course no linux drivers. The wifi driver for the rtl8191se has been recently released for linux, but needs to be recompiled (not available as rpm). I am working on it but to build the module you need the kernel source which is not so obvious with this Mandriva release. As for the webcam 1.3 Megapixel it may be a Bison cam but I am not too sure and uvc video does not seem to identify it.

[bzidler]

Ok the problem with the wireless driver is now solved. Only the webcam remains. For those that would like to know here is the thread in the Mandriva forum :

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=125528&sid=05da313aa96eba761b910748633d9ff1

[Lorem-Ipsum]

Try installing a linux webcam booth called cheese. For some reason it manages to fix many people's problems.

[bzidler]

Thanks but I know cheese quite well. It does not find any camera. 2 other applications can be used to test a camera : luvcview and mplayer. But none of them can see anything because the driver is probably not loaded.

[bzidler]

Several weeks after having Mandriva installed and running fine I discovered this weekend, after a series of updates, that the integrated bison webcam was now recognized and working perfectly through Skype. It was the only device that I could not have identified by the system. I can therefore now confirm that everything including wireless or video, is working well under this distribution of linux. I am sure that it would run as well with the other well known distributions, which makes the V14 a decent choice as a linux laptop.