I’m supposed to post this post last month while the issue was still hot, but it seems that this post has been evading me for quite some time until now. Last month a friend of ours decided to get his first laptop, after browsing the internet and satisfied with our peers’ recommendation, he settled on Compaq Presario v3521 which is a relatively new model that supports SATA2.
However the joy of getting a new laptop soon fades away when he finally found out that Ubuntu does not support that particular model! The Ubuntu installer either froze up during the LiveCD booting screen or the installation dialog doesn’t detect any hard disk attached to the laptop.
After testing it with various Linux distro including Fedora, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Solaris (ok that wasnt a GNU Linux distribution but close), It is safe to conclude that the freely available Linux distro does not support the laptop’s hardware driver. The installer will either hang, does not detect the hard disk/dvd drive or prompts for a driver CD.
Turns out to be Compaq Presario V3521 isn’t supported out from the box by Microsoft Windows XP and Vista either! According to the friend, he has no problem installing Solaris 10 and RHEL 5 Server on the laptop either. It seems the laptop requires the use of proprietary driver in order to work its hardware.
After some tweaking involved, he decided to install/use Debian 64bit on the laptop using network install, luckily besides the bumpy installation process, every other aspect of the hardware is working with the right drivers in 64bit mode.
So for all of you out there, please watch out for Compaq Presario v3521 model, it might not be for those with a faint heart.
p/s: It true, though Ubuntu seems to be easy enough to use, it might not be the best solution for you. It still has some rough edges, particularly with x86-64bit platform.
[tags]ubuntu,feisty fawn,compaq,presario,laptop,notebook,debian,red hat, fedora[/tags]
ya ya betul tu.
tapi mostly laptop skrg guna sata2
acer yang bodo2 tu pun guna sata2 ,
nak install windows pun memang tak lepas,
tambah2 lagi sape2 yang tak de external floppy drive,
untuk load driver during installation
wtf
agree with you totally…there’s huge incompatibility with the AMD chips i think.
I faced the same problem when I got my hp Compaq 6515b. But managed to install feisty on it using the alternative amd64 ISO. Maybe this friend of your’s can try it as well.
Problem now..still not able to install the broadcom wireless lan card. From my understanding it’s in the kernel 2.6.17 onwards, but currently feisty is running 2.6.16 i think.