Posts Tagged ‘hp mini-note 2133’

More on the 2133 mini note & Ubuntu

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Last weekend I had a brain spasm and installed Windows 7 on the 2133. It worked but is kinda slow, even with all the pretties turned off – the C7 just isn’t up to it. Better than the original Vista it came with though!

However, as per the title this is a few more observations on Ubuntu on the Mini Note. After toying with Windows 7 RC for a few days, and even trying to do some real work with it, I re-installed Jaunty last night. Just a full clean install of the standard downloadable DVD image with one exception – I use ext4 (though I know it works fine with the regular ext3 file system). Every thing worked fine.

I then applied my mods to xorg.conf to use openchrome. Again everything is fine.

I am not a hardware expert. I do not rebuild drivers or kernels any more. I use Ubuntu after all these years because I am now too old, too lazy and far too busy to fiddle around with recompiling stuff. All I can say is that on an Australian HP Mini-Note 2133 with the AMD C7-M 1.6GHz processor, 2Gb RAM, 120G hdd and the model with bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g wireless and 10/100/1000 Mbps ethernet everything (including vga out at 1280×768, internal microphone & mic socket) appears to work fine out of the box except openchrome which needs a TINY fix to xorg.conf.

I have used Vista, XP, Winbdows 7 and Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04 on the 2133 (and have considered trying to Hackintosh it but as noted above, no longer have the time) and Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is the smoothest, most workingest and quickest of them.

“It just works!”

But your mileage may vary.

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Mini note video with Ubuntu 9.04

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Forgot to mention in the last update that the HP 2133 Mini Note video works correctly (in 2D) with the openchrome drivers which come with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). No special xorg.conf needed.

I run my HDTV as a second monitor whenever I need something bigger to look at and openchrome does work with the Mini Note’s VGA out but only in single screen mode and the cursor will go missing, so you need to use a software cursor.

To do this open up your xorg.conf and add

Option	"SWCursor"	"true"

to the Device section.

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Ubuntu & Mini note 2133 – the next generation

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

I have dusted off the Mini Note 2133 to install Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope and add a new instalment to my history of running Ubuntu on a HP Mini Note.

But there is not much to say. I did a clean install and it just worked. I had to fiddle with the X config as per the Laptop Testing Team wiki page and I haven’t bothered with Compiz as (a) I don’t need the 3d and (b) the HP just isn’t up to it. I have more important uses for the limited processing power.

Wireless and bluetooth are much improved and connecting to the now ancient but still functioning P1i was seamless. My Huawei E169 wireless modem was identified and works – no fiddling around required!

Actually, the whole thing was surprisingly easy and (apart from the X config) is now in the realms of a famous competitor’s slogan ‘it just works’.

Would I give it to my mother? Once I had set it up – yes I would. And that is a big step forwards.

Some big improvements in the current version: wireless is quicker, easier and more reliable; bluetooth is massively better; boot up seems quicker; and battery life from the 5400mAh battery is impressive – around 3-3 1/2 hours running the Huawei USB wireless modem.

Moans? Well I think Filezilla should be a default application. Really terminal server client and remote desktop viewer are in the default install but not an ftp/sftp client? That’s about it.

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Intrepid mini-note comments

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

I have now been using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my HP 2133 mini-note for about 6 weeks, so here is the progress report.

Overall everything seems to work reliably and the machine has done stirling service. I have even done some photo editing in GIMP and am in need of 16bit TIFF support (hint hint).

The best improvement in 8.10 over 8.04 is more reliable WPA. I no longer have any problems with the WPA Supplicant getting lost on resume from hibernation. In fact, the whole wireless thing is much better and connection to my home network is very quick. As an aside I plugged a friend’s Sony Ericsson K610i in to USB so as to charge it and Gnome Network Monitor immediately reported a new mobile internet device. It doesn’t work with my P1i though – I have to use Gnome PPP manually as described previously.

Hibernation and suspend both work reliably – there is some complaining about CPU clock assertions but it ain’t broken anything yet.

I have gone back to XFCE. I like XFCE, it is simple and light(ish) but does all the business. I was tempted by the ancient charms of blackbox (I think I was in a retro mood – I used it extensively several years ago) but succumbed to the ease of use of XFCE! I can report a marked improvement in general application performance, especially application start up, using XFCE rather than Gnome.

The marked drop off in battery life I remarked on after first upgrading to 8.10 seems to have been a glitch. I am back to 90-100 minutes of use (including wlan) from a full charge on a three cell battery.

I still have to use a cable to get mobile internet (3g) via the Sony Ericsson P1i. This is actually not a major drawback given the amount of juice pulled from both batteries when using bluetooth. Using bluetooth the battery guage on the P1i falls quicker than my old 4.1l Cortina’s fuel guage on a fast blast along the Hume.

The only part still displaying any problems are the Via chrome drivers. The Beta version of 02 December runs fine in 2D mode but compiz cannot be enabled. This is not really an issue for me as I have stated before, but it is worth knowing. Openchrome doesn’t work.

So all in all, a good upgrade and a much better experience than Vista (which was painful) or XP (which is generally horrible anyway) on the little beast.

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Ubuntu ate my Mini-Note

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Feeling intrepid I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10. So, since I had been using the via chrome drivers my little computer was made very ill. Not even adding xforcevesa to the boot line would get X to start. Just a black screen with a little rectangle of white scribble in the middle.

Anyway, I keep a copy of my oldest working xorg.conf file sitting in /etc/X11 just in case. So a boot into text mode allowed me to replace the broken config with the basic vesa config. All started nicele and, as the LaptopTestingTeam wiki page will tell you it will run with vesa drivers at 16:9 (1280×720) which looks terrible.

What it didn’t tell me (at least not yesterday) was that via have released a beta of the chrome drivers for 8.10. These are 2D only but work very well for that. And you still need to fix the config (use your old via conf file – it is fine). So I do have Intrepid running nicely on the Mini-Note 2133 with decent quality 2D graphics. The nicest improvement so far is much better wireless reliability using WPA. It seems pretty flawless now and getting connected to my home network is much quicker.

Booting seems to take significantly longer than with 8.04. I haven’t timed it but I would guess 30-50% longer for a cold boot. Battery life was woeful and seems to be slightly worse now. Down from about 90 minutes with wireless to about 75 minutes – but I will keep an eye on that.

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Mini-note fixes

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

3D and WPA

A few months ago I blogged early thoughts on my HP Mini-note 2133 and noted a couple of issues. I finally got compiz running. Horrah! And WPA is now much more solid. The big issue was There are a couple of problems with the Laptop Testing Team’s wiki entry. Until I get approval to update the wiki this is what I found:

  • In /usr/bin/compiz adjust the WHITELIST to include via but do not remove the fglrx entry – add via to the WHITELIST. Then compiz works
  • Create /etc/default/wpasupplicant but the only line in it should ENABLE WPA – seems obvious but, well, I feel foolish. So your /etc/default/wpasupplicant file should contain ENABLED=1

The P1i and mobile internet

GPRS was working via bluetooth. Then it wasn’t. Then it was again. And yesterday it wasn’t. However sticking a cable in the side does work – and helps preserve a little bit of battery life which is almost as bad on the P1i as  the mini-note. the P1i makes an effective usb 3g modem. This page helps – the important bit is the initialization string (modified for vodafone): AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”vfinternet.com” and the phone number – the lovely people from vodafone reckon *99# works fine in AU; and it does on the Mac Book Pro; but *99***1# seems to work with Ubuntu. Can’t for the life of me think why that should be the case. The rest was cleanly set up by wvdialconf.

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One month of 2133

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I have been using a HP Mini-Note 2133 for about a month. It ain’t no MacBook Pro but then again it ain’t no Vaio either. Here is what I have found.

Base specs:

  • 1.6GHz AMD K7 processor – about the processing equivalent of three hamsters flipping a 20c coin
  • 1Gb DDR2 RAM – which I updated to 2Gb after two days of testing
  • 120Gb HDD
  • 8.9″ screen running 1280×768 @ 60Hz – this rather then the HDD was the Eee killer I have tried to run various linux GUIs on 800×600 in the past and it was not fun. 1024×640 isn’t quite good enough any more!
  • 802.11 b/g wireless
  • 1000/100/10 ethernet
  • bluetooth
  • SDHC card reader, 2 USB ports, horrible 3 cell battery, VGA out, unpleasant sound card, massive speakers, miscellaneous stuff

It shipped with Vista home Basic and the usual pile of crap-ware. I used Vista for a couple of days whilst testing how it worked with my P1i (it didn’t), how it responded under normal office use (a bit of Excel goes a long way, and takes a long time) and what a fully conditioned battery would do (less than 2 hours because all Australian 2133s ship with the useless 3 cell battery).

Out came the XP and instructions on how to install from USB thanks to Eeeguides.com, followed by the drivers from HP and a few odds and sods from hp2133.com. This was really just a fall back in case something went horribly wrong with the next bit.

Ubuntu on a mini-note

I can state categorically that it works.

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and followed the rather copious instructions on the Ubuntu wiki some of which has now become defunct due to 8.04.1 being out (oh if only I had waited another few weeks). I had no real trouble getting wireless to work with ndiswrapper but waiting for the WPA Supplicant to work can be painful. Video works fine but won’t play with anything except a basic desktop – no flashy compiz for me. Sound, ethernet, touchpad, bluetooth (such as it is), power management and the built in camera all work out of the box.

There have been remarks about the problems getting 3d effects working. Really, this is not a machine for graphics processing at the best of times, it is just too puny. Sub pixel font smoothing works a treat and that is as hard core as my mobile graphics requirements get!

Working with the little machine

Physically moving from a MacBook Pro to a Mini-Note has been a challenge. I like the keyboard. I am still not used to the positioning of the mouse buttons or the size of the touchpad scroll area. The screen is tiny and is not good for hours of uninterrupted use. Attached to a 66cm LCD HD TV it works real nice. It is an effective personal heater in this Sydney winter.

As for its performance, Open Office apps work fine if a little slow to start up. Firefox 3 works flawlessly with adblock plus, flashblock and web editor installed. Evolution is getting better with the recent updates and may replace Thunderbird because I cannot seem to get GCALDaemon to sync Lightning with Google Calendar (I also need to sync to a P1i – see below). GTKpod and Rhythmbox take care of the music, though I had to enable crossfade to make Rhythmbox play anything at all; totem works ; I haven’t been brave enough to try GIMP yet.

Bluetooth works. What can I say? I can connect to my P1i. I can copy files and use it as a 3G/GPRS modem. I cannot get a sync tool to work over bluetooth though. This seems be be a common problem. To overcome this I set up funambol and syncevolution and now I can sync the phone with the mini-note via wlan. Yay me!

Surprises

I have an Elgato EyeTV-DTT Stick. Yes, I am a sad Mac user (well, I was briefly a sad Mac user, now I am a sad mini-note user which is probably worse). The stick is a Hauppauge in disguise and works fine. I have given it a quick test with Me-TV and it plays and records just as it is meant to. Me-TV is extraordinarily primitive compared with my MBP experience, but then again Elgato charge a lot of money for their pretty interface.

Problems

I have an irritating issue with the wireless. There is an intermittent failure when coming out of hibernation. Usually everything comes back fine. Sometimes the wireless network won’t find my home network (mixed mode with WPA due to the aforementioned P1i) until I unload and reload ndiswrapper. Annoying. I also have a weird screensaver freeze going on. If xscreensaver decides to load the ‘matrix’ screensaver it won’t turn off. Nothing will make it go away! I have had to kill the X server. Very annoying!

Ready for prime time?

Not likely! I have a history of squeezing inappropriate linuxes onto laptops. I lived with a Thinkpad 240 running Debian for a few years and most of that spent in a command line (I toyed with killing X on the mini-note but that would just be perverse) and I have not owned a PC laptop which hasn’t run some flavour of Linux (usually dual boot I must admit) since 1997. However getting it working, whilst not difficult, is a chore and would not be countenanced by many. Once it is working it is far from flawless.

I am happy using the mini-note as my main machine because I use a text editor, a web browser and Planner/Omniplan/Project as my weapons of choice. The intermittent WiFi issue is annoying but is down to ndiswrapper and a bit of laziness on my part. The appalling battery life is a real pain. Would I give it to my mother? No, absolutely not. Ubuntu works on it, but there are still too many quirks.

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