HowTo: Ubuntu Linux on HP Pavilion series laptops
4. Video Device
On Ubuntu Linux Jaunty 9.04 and Karmic 9.10 the video subsystem is fully supported.
On Ubuntu Linux Intrepid 8.10 the video subsystem is fully supported with 3D drivers version 173. However the latest drivers version 177 have some issues during suspend/shutdown (screen getting corrupted and speakers beeping aloud).
Intel chipsets are fully supported directly by Xorg. Intel X3100 is the only one decent graphic chipset available at the moment that has a completely full featured open source driver.
nVidia is fully supported as well. There are however 2 drivers: ‘nv‘ which is 2D only and open source and ‘nvidia‘ which is 3D and full featured but closed source. In order to enable 3D you just have to enable nVidia drivers via System -> Administration menu -> Hardware Drivers.
With nvidia drivers, compiz desktop effects enabled and OpenOffice Writer Hardware Accelleration enabled you may experience redraw / refresh problems when editing and scrolling your documents. There is a workaround explanined here.
AMD ATi has fairly good support for linux. Things seem to be changing for the better lately. Here we also have 3 drivers: ‘ati‘ and ‘radeon‘ which are 2D open source and ‘fglrx‘ which is 3D closed source. In order to enable 3D you just have to enable ATi drivers via System -> Administration menu -> Hardware Drivers.
ENVY install script
You do not have to use Envy script. Latest official drivers are generally available through the update manager in a week or two from their public release date.
Using Old Envy (prior to EnvyNG) can cause some annoying issues for those not used to cope with shell mode since whenever you upgrade the kernel your graphical interface won’t work any more. (In order to fix this you should reboot in failsafe mode and type envy -t, then select the number corresponding to your driver and reboot once again after Envy has finished installing).
Envy is a very handy tool cleverly coded by Italian OpenSource supporter Alberto Milone to whom goes my credit. It can be downloaded from http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html.
Install the .deb and Choose Applications->System Tools->Envy
Choose to install the video driver.
During installation it will ask you if you would like it to configure xorg.conf for you. Choose ‘Yes’. Reboot.
If you want to use Envy on Jaunty you will only have to follow these steps:
type:
sudo nano -w /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Envy/classes.py (location seems to be changed with recent versions of Envy)
search for cassandra (through CTRL+W in pico or nano editor or CTRL+F in gedit) which will look like the following:
elif self.details['osname'] == 'cassandra':#SUPPORT FOR LINUX MINT CASSANDRA
and replace the word ‘cassandra’ with ‘gutsy’ so that it looks like the following line:
elif self.details['osname'] == 'jaunty':#SUPPORT FOR LINUX MINT CASSANDRA
Save and exit.
Then launch Envy and install dirvers for your graphics card.
Please notice that envy requires internet access and since a download might fail due to timeouts if it ends in an odd way you should run it again. Since it has to download several packages no surprise if you have to run envy a few times before completing successfully if you have a poor quality internet access.
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When using the drivers downloaded from nVidia website in order to remove the nvidia splash when X starts add option NoLogo in the graphics card section of xorg.conf
Section “Device”
Option “NoLogo” “true”
add also this in order to enable power saving features
Option “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “true”
Brightness Control malfunction on dv2xxx: brightness control can be achieved through the applet Power Management in System -> Preferences (and also with the Brightness Applet from the Gnome panel), however in case those do not work (ie. for dv2690el, dv2058ea) you can achieve the same effect via keyboard shortcus Fn+F7 Fn+F8.
The only problem is that gnome-power-manager periodically checks the display brightness, thus making the keyboard shortcut tweaking useless.
In order to disable gnome-power-manager brightness monitoring you have to run gconf-editor from shell, browse to /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight and uncheck the enable string.
User Chris in this comment suggests having a look at the patch attached at the following post which, he claims, solved this problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=673946 and at this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/145337