Lucid 5.2 working on HP Pavilion dv6500

[kommisar]

Recently bought HP Pavilion dv6500 at a garage sale. Dead hard drive but with 1GB of memory and a working DVD RW. I got it working with the lucid 5.2 live CD. The machine has an NVIDIA graphics chip (detects as Geforce7140M/nForce630M) and an 1.8 GHz dual core athlonx64 CPU. After boot and normal configuration I remastered to a multisession CD so that the settings are saved and have been saving any changes to the multi session CD. So far this setup works well. Speakers, wireless and touchpad work without any tweaking.

[sindi]

My HP dv6500 has AMD64 cpu and Nvidia 7150M video.
Works perfectly wtih lupu 2016 (Dec 2016 updated lupu).
Slacko 6.3, Tahr 6.05 and Xenial 7.5 (all 32-bit) display scrambled video -
pieces of one window scattered about the screen, icons vertically elongated. I could make out the word nouveau.

Lupu has the choice of adding an Nvidia nouveau driver. I suspect the others do it automatically and it does not work. How can I get around this?

[mostly_lurking]

Lupu has the choice of adding an Nvidia nouveau driver. I suspect the others do it automatically and it does not work. How can I get around this?

I'd try booting without starting the X server - either pick that option from the boot menu, or if there is none, press F2 or F3 on the boot splash screen, then type puppy pfix=nox at the command line. Once it's booted to the command prompt, run xorgwizard and see if it gives you another driver option, like "vesa". After finishing xorgwizard, type xwin if X doesn't start automatically.

[sindi]

Lupu xorg.conf sets the resolution to 1280x800 (correctly) with driver nv.
Tahr and Xenial set it to 1280x1024 which explains the scrambled video.

Copying xorg.conf from lupu to tahr does not help.

The terminal (framebuffer) is also scrambled before I enter X, or if I exit it with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.

I will attempt to start Tahr without X and see if it goes into framebuffer mode (which makes it impossible to select choices - I cannot even see them).

I attempted to attach the xorg.conf from Tahr.

[sindi]

The nouveau driver is being used. Start puppy with nouveau.modeset=0 to get something mostly usable but 1024x768 instead of 1280x800 and no framebuffer console, also Pale Moon at Youtube only does 360p (unless you change MSE settings to uncheck first and check third box). And possibly other odd effects.

The solution is to compile your own nvidia driver but I have not yet succeeded and I do not need 3D support (from nvidia) just 2D (nv driver).

Lucid 2016 with 3.0.25 kernel works properly and chooses the (working) nv driver so I will attempt to compile kernels 3 and 4 for the others with nv and fbcon support.

I could also attempt to compile just nv and fbcon modules rather than different (smaller faster) kernels for this laptop.