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I recently bought a Compaq Presario R3000 notebook. The first thing i did was to google for some informations about it and how to install Linux on it.

I realize that probably i still may need some programs that only run on Windows in the future so i decided not to completely delete Microsoft’s OS and to create a dual boot machine. This means that i need to shrink its partition. I did it using a Knoppix LiveCD (i tried version 3.8 and it worked perfectly) and i resized the partition thanks to QTParted.

I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on my notebook since i am already using it on my desktop computer, so i downloaded the iso and burned it using ISO Recorder as suggested in the Ubuntu Wiki.

The installation process ran smoothly and on the first boot i could already enjoy the 1280×800 resulotion of the BrighView monitor and the touchpad worked like a charme (not that i care too much since i always use a USB mouse).

Time to head to the unofficial Ubuntu guide and add some repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list

Unfortunately as soon as i installed Nvidia drivers for my GeForce4 440 card something screwed up and all i could see was a 1024×768 display that left a black stripe on the right of the monitor. Taking a look at /var/log/Xorg.log i could notice that something was wrong with EDID so i took a look at the documentation placed in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-glx. There i knew some intersting details about the drivers so i modified the /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc file and added the lines:


options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0
options nvidia NVreg_Mobile=0


This solved my problem.

Another issue is the wireless connection. R3000 is equipped with a Broadcomm card which works perfectly using ndiswrapper (lovely piece of software!).

Audio worked perfectly. I just had to configure the volume buttons on the side of the notebook, which is easily done with the keyboard shortcut gnome helper.

All the rest just worked out of the box.

I hope this helped!