A friend of mine just asked me for help with his new laptop. He wanted to try out Jaunty, but got stuck with a couple of show stoppers: no WIFI and no sound. The hardware is already supported in newer releases of ALSA and the Linux kernel, so 9.10 “Karmic” will probably run flawlessly with this HP out of the box. Here’s how to fix it:

• Wifi: it ships an Atheros AR9285 wireless card. From the Official Linux Wireless wiki we can see that it is supported on kernels >= 2.6.29. Jaunty comes with 2.6.28, but it is not a problem:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

• Sound: Update ALSA. This is for the latest snapshot:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tiwai/snapshot/\
alsa-driver-unstable-snapshot.tar.bz2 -O -| tar xvj
cd alsa-driver-unstable
./configure --enable-dynamic-minors
make
sudo make install-modules
echo "options snd_hda_intel model=hp-dv5" | \
sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Problem solved. Reboot and enjoy.