Gentoo on an HP Compaq dc7700p

Well, some weeks ago the folks at work have given me an HP Compaq dc7700p computer with XP preinstalled. Of course, the first thing I did was installing Gentoo. It was the 2006.1 release and now 2007.0 has been officially released, but I have learned that postponing an install waiting for a new release does not make sense most times, unlike in other distros.

Anyway, I partitioned the disk and installed the base system. An unexpected side effect is that WinXP does not boot anymore, but I don't care right now. There must be some easy solution, don't be scared to do this on your computer. Just remember to Back Up Your Data.

I like to compile my own kernels instead of using genkernel. While trying to make DMA work on the SATA disk (which kept appearing as /dev/hda instead of sda), I found some info suggesting that it simply was not possible to install Linux on an HP dc7700. Well, I had managed to install Gentoo, so how come? I cannot quite recall every single step I did to install the OS, but the main thing is that I booted a Knoppix CD and installed Gentoo from there. I hope you can find some tips here to get Linux working on your HP.

One thing that annoyed me was that the the text consoles were full of garbage, which made it impossible to read any errors during the boot process. I solved it by disabling the framebuffer in the kernel.

Some relevant parts of my kernel (gentoo-sources-2.6.20-r5) configuration are:
Processor type and features --->
[*] Symmetric multi-processing support
Processor family (Core 2/newer Xeon)
Device Drivers --->
Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers --->
<*> ATA device support
<*> AHCI SATA support
<*> Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support
Character devices --->
<*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<*> Intel 440LX/BX/GX, I8xx and E7x05 chipset support
<*> Direct Rendering Manager
<*> Intel I810
<*> Intel 830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G (i915 driver) --->
(X) i915 driver
Graphics support --->
[*] Enable firmware EDID
< > Support for frame buffer devices

I don't have ACPI enabled. Some people reported ACPI as the culprit of Linux not being able to boot, but the main reason I excluded it from my configuration is because I forgot to enable it.

Also, remember to emerge 915resolution to make your LCD work at native resolution.

If you want to know, beryl works just fine. I do not use it anymore because it did not get along with the KDE pager, but it had some useful (yes, useful) features.