Published December 30th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
HP Laptop Video under Linux
In an earlier posting I mentioned that I was yet to get the video on my HP Centrino laptop (HP Pavilion ZT3000) running at its native 1280×800 under Linux. A commenter on another post today asked me if thats still the case…
Fortunately, no it isn’t. My HP now runs quite happily at 1280×800, under both Fedora Core 2 and 3. It took a bit of fiddling in the GUI to get figured out, but here’s how I did it.
The trick is that there’s two separate ares you need to configure in the GUI. If you go to System Settings > Display. Set the monitor type to “LCD Panel 1280×800″ and the Video Card to “ATI Radeon 9200″. You may need to restart X after changing these settings (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will do the trick).
That will tell X about the hardware, now to get the resolution going. Again we can do this in the GUI, go to Preferences > Screen Resolution and set it to 1280×800 at 60Hz. Again a restart of X may be required for this to take effect.
Thats what I’m running at the moment and the display is running nicely in its native resolution. I’ve also done a bit more fiddling about in the GUI and got a basic power management setup going. Its not ideal, but it does work reasonably well.