HP Elitebook 8530w

lspci
lspci

lsusb
lsusb

Hardware Status Overview
Devices with no status listed are untested.

.CONFIG SAMPLE CAN BE TAKEN FROM http://download.mzalendo.net/others/kernel-config.txt

Installation
Both the wired and wireless network interfaces on this laptop are too new to have drivers on the Gentoo 2008.0 livecd. One way to install Gentoo is to boot from a different livecd (Ubuntu 2008.10 amd64 and Kubuntu 2008.10 i386 are known to work) then follow the instructions at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml#doc_chap3. A few tools will be missing, such as mirrorselect. You will have to choose your mirrors manually.

If you do use the Gentoo 2008.0 livecd, you must use the parameter, or the system will hang while booting.

Make.conf

 * with gcc-4.3 or greater. With earlier versions of gcc, use
 * Use -j3 to take advantage of the dual core cpu.

Video
This laptop is available with either ATI FireGl or NVidia Quadro video cards.

ATI FireGl
Not all versions of ati-drivers compile correctly with every kernel version. Here is a table of tested kernel/driver pairs The drivers also require the following options to be configured in the kernel:

Here are the ati-specific configurations in xorg.conf:

ATI FireGl with Opensource Driver
Here is a radeon configurations in xorg.conf:

NVidia Quadro
Works out of the box with the nvidia drivers, using nvidia-xconfig and nvidia-settings it is trivial to setup X (even with a 2nd monitor)

Sound
Sound requires the following options to be configured in the kernel:

Media Keys
The Elitebook's media keys are built into a touch sensitive strip between the keyboard and the screen. The wireless switch and mute button are hardwired -- no software support is needed for their function. The audio volume controls are mapped through the keyboard like normal media keys. But the info and presentation buttons use WMI and need a special kernel configuration to work:

The hp_wmi driver will return scancodes outside of the keyboard's normal range, so X will not receive them. To use them in X, you must first use setkeycodes to translate them to keycodes. This should be done system-wide and independently of X. One good place is /etc/conf.d/local.start. Here are the lines you need to insert:

Having now exposed the keycodes to X, you must now assign keysyms to them. This can be done with xmodmap, and put in a script that can be called when X starts. Most users should call this from .xinitrc. Here is the contents of that script:

Now that keysyms are assigned, you must decide what to do with them. Running programs on keypresses can be done with xbindkeys. However, deciding what to run is the hardest part. Here is one example:

You should call xmodmap and xbindkeys from .xinitrc like this:

WiFi
The built-in Intel wireless device works fine with the iwlagn</tt> driver and net-wireless/iwl5000-ucode</tt>. However, the wireless on/off switch isn't fully integrated. Pressing the switch will disable power to the wireless card, which saves 2W according to powertop</tt>. The catch is that when you reenable the wireless card with the switch, the driver does not reload the firmware. You must reload the module with to get the firmware loaded again.

Optionally, if Wicd is installed (and the main service is running as root), then after pressing the wireless button on media panel, click on "Refresh" in Wicd client to get wireless reloaded again.

When you encounter problems with wireless not loading correctly, have a look at dmesg and watch out for something like iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode not found</tt>. As workaround you can get this file, e.g. from another distro, and copy it to /lib/firmware/</tt>.

Webcam
Webcam requires the following options to be configured in the kernel:

MMC card reader
The following kernel options should be turned on:

After rebooting and inserting MMC card you should have a device file like:

And a partition on it: