FreeBSD 6.0 on a Compaq Presario V2000 (V2570NR)

[Marc Frajola]

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


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