Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:47:12 -0800 (PST) From: Marc Frajola <ayleronn@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 6.0 on a Compaq Presario V2000 (V2570NR) Message-ID: <20060128224712.99410.qmail@web37807.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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I recently got my Compaq Presario V2570NR (V2000-series) laptop running FreeBSD after battling a couple problems, and wanted to share what I had to do in order to get both FreeBSD 6.0 booting normally and Xorg 6.8.2 running with the screen in the proper 1280x768 resolution. The Presario V2570NR is an AMD Turion 64bit mobile 1.8GHz processor with 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics (which *appears* to borrow 128M from system RAM), 60GB disk, DVD+/-RW, integrated Broadcom B/G wireless, USB/firewire, and Realtek 10/100 wired LAN. The first hurdle was getting FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE to boot at all on the machine. It hung right after the "Timecounter" messages during the kernel probe. I was fortunate enough to notice that booting FreeBSD in "safe mode" allowed it to come up into the installer. After installing, it would still only boot from the hard disk in safe mode. I wanted it to boot normally, so made a custom kernel where I removed all unnecessary devices since I figured that the hang was due to one of the device probes mucking something up, which was then causing the kernel hang after "Timecounter...". I first took out all SCSI and RAID controllers, plus all ISA network cards, still hung, but in slightly different random places over a couple boot attempts. I noticed that the serial port was not configuring properly, so I rebuilt another kernel, commenting out all SIO ports, and behold, it booted normally. Since there isn't a directly accessible serial port (at least without getting the I/O port expander), I didn't pursue trying to get a serial port working. The second and more formidable hurdle was trying to get Xorg to work in the native display resolution of 1280x768. The problem is apparently that Xorg can auto-configure VESA, which winds up choosing 1024x768, and the aspect ratio of the display is quite wrong since V2000s are widescreen. I had to do several hours of many different google searches to find the answer on a site other than the freebsd.org site. I would like to reference that link and thank the author of it for the answer: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=1024307 In short, the ATI Radeon xpress 200m has a ChipID different from the chips officially supported by the Xorg radeon(4) driver. I checked the latest Xorg version, which still doesn't claim to support xpress 200m graphics, so the hack of simply telling Xorg that the display device with ChipId 0x5460 is officially a radeon card, and once the radeon driver loads, it can run the display at the desired resolution. One wart worth noting: If I exit my Xserver normally, it can leave the display in a barely-readable mode. If I exit X by using the famed CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, it leaves the display at the proper/readable scan rate. If you have a Radeon Xpress 200m graphics and want the radeon driver to recognize it, simply add "ChipId 0x5460" in the section with BusID "PCI:1:5:0". Commentary: It would *SURE* be nice if ATI would put out native BSD drivers for their cards. The fact that NVidia does have a driver solution that is working and tested on FreeBSD is GREAT in my humble opinion, and my hat is off to NVidia for taking the time and care to make this available to our community. The problem is that extremely FEW commonly available low to middle cost laptops apparently have NVidia graphics chipsets in them, and those that I did find available seemed to have other warts or were just too expensive, so I just gave up on trying to get a decent NVidia-graphics-based laptop. For $899, this Turion laptop seems pretty zippy and it is super-nice to have a dual boot between XP and FreeBSD 6.0. I really appreciate others who came before me and went to some trouble to figure out *and* post to this list about how they got a particular laptop/notebook running with FreeBSD; that made a difference in me being able to get my V2570NR working, and I strongly encourage others to make a quick post about specifics on their particular laptop model, particularly if your laptop has NVidia graphics. Cheers, -Marc __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
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