Anyone have HP ZE4805US laptop working (US$900)

[Radek Kozlowski]

On 2004.06.27 22:21, Stuart Barkley wrote:
> My old laptop has finally given up the ghost and I'm searching for a
> replacement.  CompUSA, Best Buy and Circuit City are all selling the
> HP ZE4805US for about 900 USD and it looks like about the right
> machine for my needs.
> 
>   - AMD Athlon XP-M processor
>   - 256MB (upgradable)
>   - 60GB hard drive
>   - DVD/CD-RW
>   - ATI Radeon based video (1024x768)
>   - Integrated wireless
>   - Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
>   - Modem
>   - 2x USB 1.1
>   - 1x PCMCIA slot
>   - Printer port
>   - Serial port
>   - Headphone out/Mic in
> 
> I would prefer USB 2.0, a second PCMCIA slot and would really like to
> have a line-in port.  Otherwise this looks like a reasonable
> configuration.
> 
> Has anyone had success running FreeBSD on this or other HP/Compaq
> machines.  I've seen queries (usually unanswered publicly) about
> various HP/Compaq laptops over the past several months.  Most of the
> discussion here seems to be about Dells (I've been happy with them at
> previous jobs), IBMs (sound good) and Toshibas (I'm pretty
> dissatisfied with my old Toshiba laptop).

I'm running 5.2-CURRENT on ze4430us, which has almost the same 
configuration as your machine. Basically everything works, but you need 
to be aware of the following things:

- the Radeon card needs at least x11-servers/XFree86-4-Server-snap (or 
x.org or XFree86 4.4) to be recognized.

- the built-in wireless card is based on a Broadcom chipset, for which 
you'll need NDISulator that is at the moment only available in CURRENT.

- the ethernet adapter works with the sis(4) driver.

- modem is not recognized, but probably you won't need it anyway.

- I boot my machine with ACPI enabled so I can use the power button to 
switch it off instead of typing 'halt -p', but that's about everything I 
can do with ACPI. Suspend/resume doesn't work, I get a lot of warning 
messages about 'thermal stuff', which is probably why the fan is 
rotating very fast all the time and making quite a lot of noise. To make 
it a bit more quiet I use a kernel module named powernow_k7 (which can 
be obtained from here http://www.poupinou.org/cpufreq/bsd/powernow_k7/) 
which allows me to lower the CPU's frequency and/or voltage.

> I tried booting the FreeSBIE CD on the HP ZE4805 and it looked like
> there where problems reading from the CD drive later in the booting
> process.  I also tried booting the FreeBSIE CD on another random HP
> laptop and it appeared to lockup just after loading the acpi module.
> I've seen reports about needing special acpi tables for some systems.

I didn't have luck with FreeSBIE either and I didn't find out why, but 
what you can do is try booting a FreeBSD 5.2.1 cd and once you get to 
the first sysinstall screen, press scroll lock (that'd be pause/break 
key on HP) and then press page up to see how your devices are 
recognized. For what it's worth, I'm not using any special ACPI tables.

-Radek