Well I’m delighted to say that Ubunty Gutsy 7.10 is running on my HP Pavillion dv6558ea Intel Core duo.
I make a point about giving the computer its full title, as there are subtle and not so subtle variations between the dv6500 family, it would seem.

There are still a few tweaks to be made but essentially I have a working computer with sound (though not yet in Skype). The initial key was blacklisting Bluetooth. Once that was blacklisted I was able to get into the desktop at least - a very big step.

I’m too tired to give a detailed account but I will in the next few days, hopefully.

I may have one major problem left, ie the system freezes on logout. I think this was due to the external usb hard disk, but Aldeby spotted something in the logs that shouldn’t have been there, so now that that’s gone it should be okay. Fingers crossed.

As I say I’ll try to explain in more detail over the next few days.