Laptops

Installing Ubuntu on Compaq C702TU Laptop

Zyxware Technologies | | 2 min read

Installation of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) almost works out of the box for Compaq C702TU Laptop. It is an 'almost' because there are a few glitches here and there. However it is possible to get the system up and running with very little manual configuration and additional driver installation.

Three areas where there are problems are
a) Wireless driver support
b) Graphics card support.
c) Acceleration and speed of touchpad

The laptop comes with Broadcomm BCM 4311 chipset wireless card. The card has a restricted firmware upgrade option available but the installation through the restricted driver manager does not go through as would be expected. However there is a beautiful set of instructions for installing ndiswrapper for the bcm43xx series chipsets. The documentation is for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn but it works very well with Gutsy too.

The 702TU comes with Intel 965 chipset graphics card and the open source Intel Driver is provided with gutsy. However compiz has blacklisted the driver since it has problems rendering xvideo when desktop effects are enabled. One option is to keep Desktop effects off permanently while another is to turn it off while watching videos. Yet another option is to use XGL and use software rendering for videos. This works but there is a slight performance degradation because of software rendering of videos. There is another option to fully enable direct rendering for the fullscreen window while watching the movie in full screen mode. We have not tried this fourth option though it has been said to work fine.

The touchpad works painfully slow using the default settings. You need to do two things to change the behaviour of the touchpad. Go edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (after creating a backup) and replace the InputDevice Section for synaptics with the following settings

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.60"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.10"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.030"
Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "200"
Option "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "200"
Option "UpDownScrolling" "1"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

You can either tweak these values to configure your touchpad or install qsynaptic to do that for you.
sudo apt-get install qsynaptics
will install it for you if you want to do it that way. You will have to log out and log in back for the changes to take effect

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