Fedora Core 4 on HP nx7010

Table of contents

• History
• Introduction
• Wireless network
• USB devices
  • USB Sticks
  • USB Sticks and HAL daemon
• Bluetooth
  • OBEX file transfert
• Applications
  • VMware
• Upgrade to Fedora Core 4

Introduction This document describe the installation of Fedora Core 3 on a HP nx7010 notebook. It covers the installation as the day-to-day usage. I'll try to keep this page up-to-date as long as possible. I'll not cover the base installation which occured without any issue but the extra features such the wireless network card, the USB or SD ports.

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Wireless network My notebook was delivered with an Intel 2200BG chipset, which is not supported by FC3. Here is my adpater info (lspci output):

02:02.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company: Unknown device 12f6
        Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
        Status: Cap+ 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- SERR- 

There exists a project for this network adapter: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/. Since a few releases, the ipw2200 module is provided in standard kernel.

ipw2200 with kernel 2.6.11

After the upgrade to 2.6.11, my network card was not properly initialized:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.0.0
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw-2.2-boot.fw load failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:02:02.0 failed with error -5

A firmware upgrade was required! RPMs with firmware are available here. I installed ipw2200-firmware-2.2-5.at.noarch.rpm. Then, unload the module and restart your interface:

# rmmod ipw2200
# cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
# ifdown eth1
# ifup eth1

(Replace eth1 with your interface)

---

USB devices

USB is fully supported with the default setup. I had nothing to install manually.

USB sticks

USB sticks are detected as SCSI devices. Once inserted, mine was detected immediately:

kernel: usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using address 4Dec  7 13:03:51 moove kernel: SCSI subsystem initialized
kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
kernel: scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
kernel:   Vendor:           Model: USB DISK Pro      Rev: 1.09
kernel:   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
kernel: usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.
scsi.agent[9899]: disk at /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host0/0:0:0:0
kernel: SCSI device sda: 484352 512-byte hdwr sectors (248 MB)
kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
kernel: sda: assuming drive cache: write through
kernel:  sda:<7>ipw2200: U ipw_send_cmd Sending SCAN_REQUEST_EXT command (#26), 96 bytes
kernel:  sda1
kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

I use the automount feature to access the stick. autofs is configured via 2 files:

/etc/auto.master:

#
# $Id: auto.master,v 1.3 2003/09/29 08:22:35 raven Exp $
#
# Sample auto.master file
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# For details of the format look at autofs(5).
/auto   /etc/auto.misc

and /etc/auto.misc:

#
# $Id: auto.misc,v 1.2 2003/09/29 08:22:35 raven Exp $
#
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# Details may be found in the autofs(5) manpage

usbstick        -fstype=msdos           :/dev/sda1

USB Sticks and HAL daemon

When I setup my notebook, I disabled the HAL daemon at startup. (For security, run only the piece of software you really need ;-). But, the new Network Manager requires this daemon. I was forced to use it and my USB key was then mounted thru HAL insteal of the automountd!
No problem at all, my files were available. But! I store my SSH keys on the USB device and ssh started to complaint about my keys security. In fact, HAL mounts the USB key with a default umask: 0022 (0755 on the file system). See the mount(8).

# ls /media/USBDISKPRO
drwxr-xr-x    2 xavier   users        4096 Apr 24  2005 foo
#

To fix the correct permissions, edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/90defaultsecurity/storage-policy.fdi, search for vfat and add the following lines:

<match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat">
  <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.umask="0077" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>

Remove the USB stick, re-insert it. Device is mounted with the right options:

# ls /media/USBDISKPRO
drwx------    2 xavier   users        4096 Apr 24  2005 foo
# mount | grep USBDISKPRO
/dev/sda1 on /media/USBDISKPRO type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,sync,noatime,umask=0077,iocharset=utf8,fscontext=system_u
:object_r:removable_t,user=xavier)
#

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Bluetooth

Bluetooth worked "out of the box". Don't forget to change your PIN! (/etc/bluetooth/pin)

OBEX file transfer

To be able to transfert files via OBEX, I had to install 3 extra RPMs:

• libbtctl-0.4.1-3.i386.rpm
• openobex-1.0.1-1.i386.rpm
• gnome-bluetooth-0.5.1-5.i386.rpm

(All of them are available on rpmfind.net)

---

Applications

VMware

I use VMware workstation with a Windows XP guest. I still need some Wintel environment to be able to run very specific applications @ office.
VMware doest not officially support FC3. There are three important steps to perform to run VMware with FC3:

First, VMware setup did not find suitable modules for the running kernel, no big surprise! But the module compilation failed!
You need to apply some patches found here: http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/. Use the latest provide patch. Current is vmware-any-any-update84.tar.gz. Extract the files and execure the runme.pl script (don't care about warnings).

Second problem, once the VMware modules are successfully compiled, VMware still complaints of a bad kernel. Issue the following command:

# cp -rp /dev/vm* /etc/udev/devices/

Finally, it was impossible to properly shutdown the nx7010. Remaining message was:

Unregister_net device: waiting for vmnet8 to become free. Usage count=1

Automatic shutdown of VMware is disabled for level 0! Just issue the following command as root:

# chkconfig --level 0 vmware off

Running VMware with kernel 2.6.11

# cd 
# tar xvzf vmare-any-any-update90.tar.gz
# cd vmware-any-any-update90
# ./runme.pl