Hmm .. Just another piece of hardware I thought…

A friend of mine just bought a HP Compaq CQ71 (CQ71-120 to be precise) and Ubuntu (9.04; Jaunty Jackalope) didn’t work completely out of the box. Mainly 2 issues:

• Audio (no Sound, or just from the headphones)
• Video (Nvidia M103)

And of course, the solution is already out there, but not yet in Ubuntu. Wireless, webcam, disks, powermanagement, al worked well out of the box

Audio

We need to upgrade the ALSA version to atleast version 0.20. Since Ubuntu 9.04 comes with version 0.18 we need to update this manually.

Updating ALSA is pretty easy. Follow the instructions on this site. Pretty darn easy, just takes a bit time.

But hold on! That’s not it yet! We need to change something else. We need to add a param to the alsa configuration (/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf). Just open it with your favourite editor and add the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=hp-dv5

Video

Pretty plain and simple. Just download and install the latest NVIDIA driver packages from Nvidia.com. If you knowwhat you are doing, I don’t need to tell you this. If you have never installed the Nvidia Drivers then follow these steps

1. Download the latest Linux Nvidia Driver
2. Jump down to the terminal! (applications –> accessoires –> gnome-terminal)
3. Change the attributes of the linux nvidia driverpackes to be executed , aka
   1. chmod a+x nameofthedriverpackage.run
4. Install the build-essentials since we need to compile the driver
   1. sudo apt-get install build-essential
5. Stop Xserver since the installation of the driver requires no Xserver running
   1. sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
6. Switch to the first terminal (by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1) and loggin in.
7. Change to the directory of where you downloaded the driver and run it!
   1. sudo ./nameofthepackage.run
8. Follow the instrunctions on the screen. Reboot afterwards.