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.
Sunday 15 February 2009, 5:00 PM
Weekend Success - Ubuntu 8.10 on the HP 2133 Mini-Note
This weekend I had some time to spare, and once I get something like that in my mind I keep turning over and over, trying to figure out another approach... and it bothers me that openSuSE, Mandriva, MEPIS and VectorLinux all install just fine, but I can't get Ubuntu installed. So I decided to bite the bullet and use the text based alternate installer, then use what I know about Linux on the Mini-Note to get the graphics working. It turned out to be somewhat easier than I expected.
The text installer is very routine, and works very smoothly. Once it was done, the Mini-Note still wouldn't boot normally, but I could at least make a recovery mode boot, drop to a root shell, and make whatever changes I wanted to try. A few cycles of that convinced me that absolutely none of the graphic drivers was going to work, even though I knew that the fbdev driver worked on openSuSE, the vesa driver works on MEPIS and Vector, and the stable openchrome driver works on Mandriva (none of them is quite right, but they all are at least usable, generally at 1024x768 resolution). So, my last shot was to compile the latest openchrome svn snapshot, and try that... and it works perfectly! You could have knocked me over with a feather when it came up, because the way it was failing with all of the other drivers had convinced me that there was something more fundamental going wrong. I am even able to use it with the extremely minimal xorg.conf that Ubuntu generally uses, and it finds and configures everything, brings the screen up and 1280x768, and works wonderfully,
Once that was done, the rest of the installation and configuration was routine, and Ubuntu 8.10 is now running just fine on the HP 2133. I even got one extra benefit - openSuSE 11.1 uses the same X.org X Server version as Ubuntu 8.10 (1.5.2), so I was able to copy over the openchrome driver files, and now open SuSE handles the display correctly as well!
jw 15/2/2009
PreviousComments on this post
Hi Jamie, did you get the Broadcom wireless working on Ubuntu 8.10? I gave up rather easily since I have a USB wireless device based on Railink which works a dream.
Hi Moley, Yes, after I installed Ubuntu it came up with the "hardware drivers" dialog, and gave me a choice between the "Broadcom STA" drivers and the public "b43" drivers. I have tried both, and they both seem to work, at least in my first superficial connection tests.
jw
You can see why an "average Windows user" would recoil in horror from Linux tales like this!
The average Windows user would recoil in horror from some of the things I have had to do to get Windows upgrades to work!
Let's face it. The 'average' Windows user doesn't want to install ANY operating system. He/She just wants the operating system which came with his/her computer to work, and be able to get his/her work done.
I've just shunted my Windows 7 install onto another machine, and installed Ubuntu 64 on my old acer ferrari test machine. Surprisingly (to me) the audio worked straight away as it would with vista or 7. Not so with XP, you'd have to go to acer europe and download, unsip, install etc.
Im liking the feel and am excited at the potential discovered. I do enjoy the bells and whistles involved with windows, so I shall be exploring 3D desktop and the like.
Just one thing though, my wireless adapter won't work out of the box which in a way is a good thing, because this is how i'll learn to get to grips with the way things are done on linux. I've also downloaded a fresh copy of Kbuntu KDE rmx 4 as I find this useful for fixing certain windows problems in the most unorthadox of ways.
So now I discover that using the 64 bit version is going to be really tricky! As a consequence I'm now downloading the 32bit distro, so that I may have a more gentle introduction!
@JGFuller - Yes, I can imagine that an ordinary Windows user, or any other kind of user, would be intimidated by situations such as I described. But I wouldn't expect them to need or want to do so, because the HP 2133 is sold with a perfectly good Linux distribution (SuSE Enterprise Linux), except in the U.K. where I personally think that HP made a very bad decision in not offering it with Linux.
@cwsnyder - I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. The "average user", whether they be Windows, MacOS, Linux or other, doesn't want to be concerned with the operating system at all. That is why, on one hand, the only real chance that Linux has of making progress in the desktop market is by being sold pre-installed by the major OEM's, but on the other hand it leads to stories like the one circulating recently where a student purchased a Linux netbook, and then nearly failed a class because it wouldn't run the Windows applications that the professor "required".
@roger andre - Unfortunately, installing and running 64-bit Linux is prone to similar problems and pitfalls as 64-bit Windows.
jw 16/2/2009
@JGFuller- I downloaded the win7 beta, and installed on a spare computer.
Could not find my nic card, or my SB audio card. Plus on every re-boot it would lose the video card driver, leaving me with a 640X480 Resolution. I spent 2 days trying to load drivers from XP and vista. Finally gave up, wiped the disk, put in a live CD of ubuntu 8.10. It found everything so I hit the install icon and now have a complete system that works with less than 30
minutes of time. I plugged in my HP ,F4100, All-in-one printer, and a small box popped up and said the printer was ready for use. My conclusion is that Linux is easier to install, no extra programs to buy and install for "protection"
like that "swiss cheese" OS from Redmond. I still use XP on one machine for the kids games. I"m spending 2 weeks in North Wales next month and my laptop has Mandriva 2009.0 installed, and it will be my companion there. I LOVE being in a windowless world.
The advice that is all over the Internet (i.e., force the vesa driver) worked for me when I first got the HP mininote 2133 and again after the main board was replaced the first time. When I got it back this past week, after the main board was replaced for a second time, I had the same problem as you described. Your post pointed me in the right direction for a solution, but I'd like to add that to get the networking enabled, I needed to follow
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-networking-configuration-using-command-line.html/comment-page-2#comment-6270
and to compile and install the latest openchrome driver, I needed to follow
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenChrome#Ubuntu%208.04%20and%20newer%20releases
Now it works perfectly! I'm hoping that this change means that the main board will take a much longer time to fail, but I'm not that optimistic.
Thanks, and I hope this can help some other people!
Betsy
betsylavolette.com
@Betsy - Thanks for reading and commenting, and I'm very pleased that my post got you going in the right direction to get your Mini-Note working again.
I fully agree with you about using the Ubuntu Community Documentation, that is the same page that I have bookmarked and go to whenever I need to compile the latest openchrome SVN snapshot. I am now pleased to report that those instructions work for the WSVGA (1024x600) display as well as the WXGA (1280x768) display.
However, I don't understand why you had to do anything at all to get the networking enabled. I have installed Ubuntu (8.10 and 9.04) several times now, on two different HP 2133 netbooks, and every time it was able to detect and activate the Broadcom wired and wireless network adapters with no trouble. The only thing that I saw which might be a bit confusing is that it took a minute or two after the first boot, with the wired ethernet connected, before it came up with the dialog asking what drivers to install for the Broadcom wireless adapter. Once that comes up, I have tried both of the options and they both work just fine for me.
jw
