Ubuntu and the HP Mini 5101 — follow-up

I'm very much enjoying using my Mini 5101. It performs much better than I expected, and now that I have my corporate VPNs and SSH tunnels set up in Ubuntu I have a fully portable support platform, for just such an emergency. I even have a 3G USB modem working (more on that some other time as there is a new model coming out I want to try as well).

Just to clean up some loose ends, I think the ACPI issue has to do with a strange BIOS setting. Intel Atom processors are all single-core as far as I am aware, and yet the dual-core option int he BIOS was enabled by default. Once I disabled this I haven't had any other boot problems since.

The webcam was easy enough to set up simply by making sure the camera was enabled in the BIOS and installing the luvcview and uvccapture packages.

Why would I bother with Windows?

Ubuntu and the HP Mini 5101

I just got a new HP Mini 5101 netbook and the first thing I had to do was rip out Windows and install Ubuntu. I'm just more productive that way.

Unfortunately, not all of the hardware works "out of the box". After two days of Google research, I've got two important things working.

Bluetooth and wired networking work fine with the default installation of Ubuntu 9.04. The trouble spots come from ACPI, WiFi and sound.

Getting the WiFi interface up and working was easy. Just install the linux-restricted-modules package and reboot. Everything comes up on its own then.

Sound was a little more tricky. You need to do two things:

1. Install the linux-backports-modules package for your kernel version (sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-`uname -r`)
2. Add the line options snd-hda-intel model=laptop to the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf then reboot.

ACPI is much more complex as it seems to cause a lot of problems booting — enough so that you can't get past kernel errors when you start up. You can get around this by adding acpi=off to the kernel parameters in your grub startup, however this doesn't give you battery information, disables the second CPU core and can cause system lockups. My current workaround — as strange as it is — is to boot only while on battery power, but the battery has to be mostly charged. This has worked every time so far, although I'm not sure why.

I wrote this entry on my new HP Mini and I have to say the best thing about this netbook is the keyboard. It's almost full sized so I don't feel cramped or like I need a special keyboard wand.

More as I find other things that don't quite work as expected. I haven't tried the webcam yet, but I'm not sure that I even care about it at this point.