Linux on the Compaq Evo N610c
Last Updated: Feb 28, 2003Overview
The Compaq Evo N610c is a business laptop that has a nice balance between power and portablility. I run Linux on my Evo N610c, and use it for work every day. All of the hardware works to some degree, but there are a few significant annoyances.Display
I have the 1400x1050 display, and oh, is it sweet. I almost went with the lower-res screen because I was concerned that the fonts would be too small, but then I realized that I could just run larger fonts. The screen is really bright and sharp, and feels bigger than it really is. I love it.Video runs at 1400x1050, with 24 bit color, using the "radeon" driver from XFree86 4.2. I also have the "radeon" and "agpgart" kernel modules loaded. DRI works for 3D applications. My XF86Config file is here.
The display is a little flaky, though - sometimes after booting, or after running a full screen app, it will get filled with lots of moving lines. This can be fixed when it happens by switching from X to a console with ctrl-alt-f1, and then back to X with ctrl-alt-f7. Closing the lid will make the screen go completely crazy when you re-open it, but this can also be fixed by switching to a console, closing and re-opening the lid, and the switching back to X.
Hooking up an external video card worked fine the one time I tried it, although I was just mirroring the built-in screen on a projector. I haven't tried expanding my desktop accross the built-in and external screens, so I'm not sure if that's possible.
Sound
Sound works, via the i810_audio driver. But occasionally sound won't work after I've cold-booted the machine, and I have to reboot for the card to function properly. I'm not sure why this is. It seems to happen less often now that I've upgraded to the 2.4.20 kernel (I'd been using 2.2.18 before) , but it still happens occasionally.Mouse
The Evo N610c has both a trackpad and a pointer stick. The trackpad works consistently, but the pointer stick never seems to work after cold-booting the machine, you have to reboot first. I use an external USB mouse, which works fine. The USB controller works using the usb-uhci driver.Ethernet
The built-in ethernet card works perfectly with the eepro100 driver.Modem
The modem works, but you have to install the 3rd-party (but free) "ltmodem" driver, available here.Power management
This is where I've had the most problems. First, don't use ACPI. The ACPI support in current Linux kernels does not support the N610c, and has the effect of disabling the fan, which could cause the machine to overheat and burn itself out! Use APM instead.APM support has one major problem: By default the machine will suspend itself after 5 minutes of inactivity, and then when it wakes up it will stop responding to keyboard and mouse events. Obviously this is very bad. One possible workaround is to run the mouse_uf program available here. This program runs in the background and tries to keep the keyboard and mouse from locking up. I've had mixed success with it, mostly because I haven't figured out a way to make it start reliably during bootup. But other people have reported that it worked for them, and I've found that if I start it manually (as root) it lets my run off battery powere with no problems.
Suspend-to-RAM works, although you have do deal with the garbled screen upon resuming (see the display section above).
