Specifications

Model: Compaq EVO N1020v
BIOS: PhoenixBios?
CPU: Intel Celeron 1.6 Ghz
Video: ATI IGP 340M (Radeon Mobility M7)
Screen: 14" TFT 1024x768
HD: 30GB
NIC: RealTek (RTL-8139) 10/100
Modem: Conexant HSF 56k HSFi
Sound: ACER ALI 5451

Background

I recently (2003-06-27) bought a Compaq Evo n1020v laptop and installed Debian unstable on it. When I made the decision to go with n1020v my requirements were:

• relatively painless Debian installation
• cheap (the unit was 999 euros)
• powerful enough (Celeron 1.6Ghz, 256MB ram, 30GB HD)

I found a positive installation story on the web and went and bought the machine. Here are my experiences with it.

Base installation

I never booted the machine to Windows but went straight with Debian net install. I burnt a small ISO image to a CD-R and booted the machine from it. Base installation went fine but when I wanted to really install sid instead of woody there were major problems caused by the architecture change. I ended up with having to manually install several packages via dpkg and the result was that quite a lot of packages were downloaded but never installed. A small pain but I can live with it.

After the base installation the system was usable, even XFree86 worked with 4.2 ati driver. I wanted to get everything out so I decided to install 4.3.0.

New kernel

At this point I compiled a new kernel (2.4.21) with the neccesary goodies. This did not give any immediate benefits but I was happier.

XFree86 4.3.0

Unfortunately 4.3.0 is not yet available even on sid so I had to download it manually. Fortunately the XFree86 people have provided a painless overwrite installation system and I had no problems simply overwriting the required parts of the 4.2 setup. It did take some fiddling with XFree86 -configure but I managed to get to the point where I had a completely working 4.3.0 installation running on top of Linux 2.4.21.

New kernel - again

Now I started to experiment with power management. I soon noticed that APM does not work as well as it should. The suspend-to-ram functionality did not work and there was no way of suspending to disk. So I decided to patch the 2.4.21 with the latest ACPI patch.

This was a bad move. The ACPI patch simply does not provide the required functionality on a stock 2.4.21. I could have patched swsusp but I decided to move to the 2.5 series as it sounded mature enough for my purposes.

I downloaded 2.5.73 and copied the old .config file and ran make oldconfig. Again, a mistake. Now the display didn't respond after the first two lines at boot. After some googling I found out that there are several display related options that have changed in 2.5 and need to be switched on. After I switched them on the machine booted fine and the swsusp worked OK.

Software suspend

The only catch with the swsusp I've found out so far is that some devices do not wake up from hibernation. I have had problems with both the PCMCIA and USB support. Both work fine if I install them as modules and unload them before hibernation and load them back after resume. So, not a big problem again.

Suspend to RAM

This does not work at the moment. I have no idea why and Google has provided no answer either.

Sound

The 2.5 series kernel is a good choice for this laptop soundwise. The ALi5451 sound card is supported by the included ALSA drivers. Also the sid ALSA support is adequate. Just install alsa-base, alsa-utils, alsaconf and libasound and do not forget to turn on OSS emulation as several X11 programs prefer that.

Conclusion

So far so good. I have a 30-day money back guarantee on the laptop but I don't think I'm going to take it back.