Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Tuesday 27 January 2009, 2:06 PM
Linux on the HP 2133 Mini-Note, Part 1
So here is what I have found out so far:
- SimplyMEPIS 8.0 RC2: The LiveCD booted just fine, the install was absolutely routine, the same as it was on my other two laptops, and it works really well. I can't even begin to put into words how pleased and impressed I am. This was the last of the distributions that I tried, and it worked by far the best. The VIA CPU, Chrome9 display adapter, Broadcom Gigabit wired network and Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g wireless network were all recognized and work just fine. WOW! The only thing that I have seen so far that isn't working properly is the sound, so I will be looking into that next.
- openSuSE 11.1: This was the first one that I tried, and it is the one I thought might work the best, because the 2133 is available with SuSE Enterprise preloaded. In fact it does work for the most part, but not as well as MEPIS. The LiveCD booted and installed, but I had to grapple with the screen resolution at first. I was finally able to get it going at 1024x768, but I haven't gotten any better than that yet, and at that resolution it's giving up one of the nicer advantages of the 2133 display. The Broadcom wireless adapter was also not configured by the initial installation. I found instructions on the Internet on how to download and install the driver, and that worked just fine. The one thing it does better than MEPIS is that the sound works perfectly. If I could get the screen resolution up to 1280x768, it would actually be a bit better than MEPIS overall, but it is nowhere near as easy to install and configure.
- Ubuntu 8.10: The LiveCD doesn't boot properly, the display is completely corrupted.
- Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3: The LiveCD doesn't boot properly, but it actually gets a bit further along than Ubuntu 8.10, the wallpaper is displayed, but then the keyboard and mouse don't respond.
- Mandriva One 2009.0: The LiveCD doesn't boot properly, the display is blank.
- Fedora 10: The LiveCD doesn't boot properly, the display is corrupted in all sorts of random, colorful ways.
- PCLinuxOS 2009 Beta 2: The LiveCD doesn't boot properly, the display starts black, but slowly changes to being completely washed out.
- Debian 5.0 Beta: The LiveCD boots, but the screen resolution is completely wrong, only about one quarter of the top left area of the screen is displayed, and the keyboard and mouse do not respond.
- Vector Linux 6.0 RC3: The LiveCD boots and installs, but the screen resolution is only 1024x768. Worse, the Broadcom wireless adapter is not recognized, and I didn't find any obvious info on how to fix that.
So, there you have it. I'm likely to be using MEPIS for the time being, I'm very pleased with it and I don't care much about the sound - well, other than for watching Dialog Box, of course. It will be interesting to see if and when future releases of these distributions work on this netbook.
jw 27/1/2009
PreviousComments on this post
Jamie - My success with Ubuntu, except as yet the Broadcom wireless adapter, was actually using a modified version called' Easy Peasy'. There is one quirk every time I start it up in that it always seeks to go through an installation routine which has to be dismissed.
Apart from these issues, and mixed feelings about the Desktop, it runs just like any other Ubuntu installation.
I suspect thast suport for via chipsets is the root of most of your difficulties. But it does puzzle me that different flavours of Linux based on the same basic underpinnings experience different hardware issues.
Hi, have you used the best working installation (SimplyMEPIS 8.0 RC2) to obtain hardware and software information (e.g. dmesg, lspci, .config and URL to download the working kernel) that you could provide to the other distributions along with what didn't work?
Some details provided back could help the various distributions' communities better support the HP 2133.
Regards,
Arthur.
@Moley - I too am puzzled by the wide range of Linux distribution success/failure on the HP 2133. I think the problem is the large number of "oddball" devices - the VIA CPU, Chrome9 graphics, Broadcom wired and especially wireless ethernet, and ADI 1984 sound. The display is obviously the biggest problem, and even the ones which work aren't really "getting it right" in the sense of using the VIA UniChrome driver; openSuSE uses the FrameBuffer (fbdev) driver, and MEPIS uses the VESA driver. I suppose it is a question of what additional drivers each of the distributions have added to the common base.
@amarsh04 - Thanks for reading and commenting. I am working on assembling the information about hardware and software support, but at the moment I am struggling to figure out what "really" works, and what only "appears" to work, superficially. I want to then combine that with what I can figure out about adding the "correct" drivers from the VIA Linux web site. That will take some time, but I think that providing information which subsequently turns out to be incorrect is worse than nothing at all in most cases - and it has the effect of damaging credibility at the same time.
As I said in the initial review, this HP 2133 is a bit long in the tooth as netbooks go, and pretty unusual in that it uses the VIA CPU and chipset rather than an Atom CPU and more "standard" Intel chipset. The question, now, is whether the Linux distributions have not "caught up" with this hardware, and it will in fact come along in the next releases, or whether this hardware is being "bypassed".
jw 28/1/2009
The issue with graphics is that the latest stable release of openchrome doesn't actually work properly with the MiniNote. It's quirky, and support was only added in SVN following the last stable release. If you go to an SVN snapshot of openchrome, it'll work.
On Mandriva, you should be able to ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a console, then you can log in as root and change to the 'vesa' driver with drakx11. Then grab http://www.happyassassin.net/extras/x11-driver-video-openchrome-0.2.904-0.689.1mdv2009.0.i586.rpm , install it, and switch back to openchrome. It should work, a couple of users have tested it for me.
Oh, and I should also give you advice for Fedora now too, shouldn't I? :)
Try booting the installer with the kernel parameter 'vesa'. That should force it to use the 'vesa' driver both during install and for the installed system. Then you could build an openchrome snapshot, or just stick with vesa. Maybe I'll throw up a Fedora snapshot package on happyassassin soon.
I haven't tested the above, but it ought to work.
For the wireless - on Mandriva, see http://www.happyassassin.net/broadcom-proprietary-wireless-driver-on-mandriva-linux-2009/ . For Fedora, RPM Fusion (http://www.rpmfusion.org) has packages for the Broadcom proprietary driver, I think. If you just install the package - it's called kmod-wl - then reboot or just do 'modprobe wl', it should bring up the adapter and you can configure it with NetworkManager after that.
