No, it’s not mine. I’m afraid a dv7 is a bit beyond my desire, although I could easily reach for one and afford it. Nope, a family member cast out a year-old quad-core desktop and picked up this lovely machine for exactly what the desktop sold for. Judging by the color, this was made for Ubuntu. 
If you’re one of those people (like me) who has an easier time visualizing a machine by hearing the numbers assigned to it … :
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Of course, it was sold with Vista and got Ubuntu as an upgrade (yes, in my opinion, Ubuntu is an upgrade for Vista). Right now the only thing that appears to be not working, according to the owner, is the wireless card.
(I’m guessing that’s because the Atheros 5-series drivers are still marked experimental in 8.10 … ? I only say that because the chipset appears to be the same as the one in my Corega CG-WLCB54AG2, which I got for a lousy 500 yen and configured under 2.6.28 by enabling the experimental drivers in the kernel. I’m probably wrong though.)
Nice looking machine though. Lots of power, smooth and slick surface. Definitely worth being jealous of. My only question: Why use blue lights on a machine that sports a bronze theme? Oh well, no matter. … 
Wow, for a second there I thought K. Mandla finally upgraded to a decent laptop.
My sister got a dv6 for college last year. It has black/silver covering with white lights.
Ha! No way! I refuse to admit 2001 was eight years ago.
I have a dv7 laptop and did the same exact installation as this. I am glad to say that the wireless now works! Ubuntu is definitely a great alternative to vista, which I am sure many people will be happy to hear. Only problem with it is the graphics, which I am having trouble with installing the drivers for. I cant seem to make flash dependent applications work, so sites like youtube cant work so far for me. I am positive that the ubuntu community will find a solution to this soon, so I will keep this news updated.
I also found that found earlier that windows xp can be installed now with full driver support (not from HP). A team of hackers went out and customized a windows xp that can work. It is called windows xp dark edition. Its a torrent, and it comes in an iso which needs to be burned to a disk.
Flash makes a 64 bit version for GNU/Linux, but you have to search around for it a bit(i think it is still in beta). Also, if you use the proprietary fglrx driver for it and want to use Compiz Fusion, it interferes with video and flash playback. I also found on my dv-7 if I want to use fglrx, it interferes with the proprietary ath_hal for wifi. The non-proprietary ath5k works awesomely. All in all the only thing I cant get to work is the darn infra-red port to work.
Does anyone know if these issues have been fixed? I recently purchased the HP dv7 as seen above and am thinking about loading ubuntu on it…but to be honest, don’t want the hassle of having “fix” things that are otherwise not broken..Right now, the machine runs like a dream, but I’m tired of every SINGLE day there is some storage hungry update that is ready for vista.
As of the Karmic Koala, the video and sound are 1000% better on this laptop! The only issues I have are the IR port doesn’t work, although I think that it is supported, i just havent really looked into it since the update, and the “MediaSmart” button still registers a “v”.