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Compaq Presario M2223AP

This laptop (in the M2000 series) has a couple of gotchas for Linux support:

Wireless

The wireless chipset (Intel 2200BG) has an open-source driver but it requires closed-source firmware; therefore the driver is not in the standard LinuxKernel.

You can download the driver (and the firmware) from http://ipw2200.sf.net, although you will also need to build the ieee80211 support modules which are currently outside of the kernel tree (I think there is a version of them in linux-2.6.13-rc1, so it might be a part of future releases).

Ubuntu Linux (5.04) already comes with support for this wireless card out of the box, so you should be all ready to go.

Graphics

The graphics controller uses an Intel 915GM chipset, which is supposedly supported by XOrg's i810 driver. However, it doesn't seem to be properly supported by the version of Xorg in Hoary, and graphics didn't work out of the box. (!!)

http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-June/008272.html suggests it all works with newer versions of various packages, so hopefully it will just work in the next release of Ubuntu.

For now, use the "vesa" graphics driver. Otherwise, if you really want to use the i810 driver, you can download a newer snapshot of the driver from http://dri.freedesktop.org/snapshots/. I used the "i915-20050718-linux.i386" which at least got X working with the i810 driver. You'll also need the "common-20050718-linux.i386" to get newer versions of Xorg's libdrm.a and GL modules. (If you install the driver but don't install the "common" package, you'll get an error in your Xorg.0.log file like "libdri version is 4.1.0 but version 5.0.x is needed").

But at least it looks like this will all work out of the box in Ubuntu 5.10 aka "Breezy Badger".

(The difficulty in supporting this chip is described in an xorg thread.)

The graphics card lets you use "Xinerama" (dual head) mode so you can have an extra wide desktop that stretches over two monitors. See our i915-xorg.conf page. (This might possibly require the updated i810/i915 support from above, I didn't test this with the vesa driver).

BlueTooth

The laptop has built-in BlueTooth. It appears to be attached to the USB internal bus, so make sure your kernel has CONFIG_BT_HCIUSB support. The kernel that came with Ubuntu 5.04 had this.

Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work (with a custom 2.6.11 kernel) - every time I got gnome-bluetooth-manager to scan for other devices, I got a

kernel: hci_cmd_task: hci0 command tx timeout

message in dmesg/syslog.

Touchpad

With the default xorg.conf(5x) that Ubuntu (5.04 Hoary) generated, the touchpad generates a middle-click when you tap it, which is very annoying. Changing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to have

        # don't do anything for 1-finger taps
        Option          "TapButton1"            "0" # 0 = no action

in the synaptics touchpad InputDevice section made no difference either. However, disabling the synaptics driver completely (by commenting out or removing the "InputDevice Touchpad" line from the ServerLayout section meant that it was just seen as a normal mouse (using the already existing "Configure Mouse" InputDevice). This has the disadvantage that the vertical scrolling function of the touchpad no longer works, but that is an acceptable tradeoff to not have middle-clicks generated everywhere :) You can still get a middleclick (mouse button2) by pressing buttons 1 and 3 simultaneously -- this assumes you have the Emulate3Buttons option for the default mouse InputDevice.

Other

The video card supports having a 2nd monitor, so it looks like you can use this in dual-head mode as well as just using it as an external monitor.

The "Expansion Port 2" slot is only for attaching the laptop to Compaq's docking station.

The 6-in-1 card reader might work (the LinuxKernel supports this -- CONFIG_MMC found in Device Drivers -> MMC/SD Card -> MMC support) but I only have CompactFlash cards, which aren't supported by this reader.


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