On Tuesday I collected my new laptop from our IT department and surrendered my trusty Compaq Evo N620c. Due to a mixup I didn’t get the machine I was supposed to (a big HP desktop replacement, the model number of which escapes me), but instead got a “standard issue” machine with an additional 1GiB RAM. The machine I received is an HP Compaq nc6220 with 2GHz Pentium M CPU, 2GiB RAM, 80GiB disk, 1400×1050 display, DVD/CD writer, Bluetooth and Intel IPW2200 wireless.

I had backed up the N620c (which was running Debian GNU/Linux 3.1) and my plan was to partition and format the 6220’s disk and untar the backups onto it. Sadly, things didn’t go according to plan… I managed to stuff up /lib, which meant I couldn’t sync(1) and had to power off the machine to boot from a rescue CD. When I fixed /lib, it seemed /dev had been corrupted by the unclean shutdown. I started again and, after reformatting, extracted my backups a second time. All went well this time and the machine booted fine first time.

Once the backup had been restored, it was fairly straightforward getting everything configured for the new hardware. I built a 2.6.15 kernel and got X.Org 6.9 working on the Intel 915GM graphics at 1400×1050 (see the links below for detailed instructions). The Intel wireless is supported by the vanilla 2.6.15, which made setup trivial (I just needed to grab the firmware).

Some useful links:

I’m pretty happy with the machine - peformance is good (even the X11 composite extension is usable) and it’s a fair amount thinner and lighter than my N620c. My only complaint is that the vesafb framebuffer console doesn’t support 1400×1050 and so I have to use a 1024×768 console (1280×1024 has the wrong aspect ratio and suffers from some strange visual artifacts). I haven’t installed Suspend 2 yet, but will do so in the next day or two.

Now that my Debian installation (since upgraded from 3.1 to “testing”) is working well, it’s time to install my operating system of choice, NetBSD…