HP2133 Mini-Note

Trizon · 05-06-2008, 08:01 AM

I have ordered an HP 2133 Mini-Note. It comes preinstalled with Vista, but I plan to wipe it and install Linux. It is an ultra portable, so I expect it will be a bit slower than normal laptops from what I've read. Here is a link to the model I ordered.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...5-3704511.html

I'm thinking about installing OpenSuse on it, but I'm not sure. Some of the lower models come with Suse preinstalled. The only other distro I've seen that people have tried on this kind of laptop is Ubuntu. I've looked for a distro that I could use e17 with, but I have never tried the ones I found and I'm not sure what kind of problems I will have with drivers.

Does anyone have any experience with Linux on this laptop? Do you have any suggestions?

Simon Bridge · 05-07-2008, 06:08 AM

E17 is a DTE - will work on anything, but Ubuntu has probably the easiest install as well as an elbuntu project.

Cannot see anything in the mini-note which will cause strife.
Make your backup and have fun.

Trizon · 05-07-2008, 07:49 AM

Thank you for the reply.
When I received the machine last night, I went ahead and tried OpenSuse on it and it worked just fine. The only problem I had was with the video. But I was able to find the driver at VIA, here:

http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action

After that, everything seemed to work great! So I am happily running OpenSuse on my new mini-note now.

Simon Bridge · 05-07-2008, 06:52 PM

Very cool - please make an HCL entry for the mini note - there currently isn't one.

rash.m2k · 05-15-2008, 10:55 AM

Trizon could you please tell me how you installed openSUSE on it and what version?

I have it installed but the wireless drivers don't work nor can I adjust the brighness of the screen, also the CPU always seems to stay at 100% doesn't step down when load is low.

Please post a guide, also do you have a external DVD rom drive that you booted off?

Trizon · 05-16-2008, 10:09 AM

Actually, I better check the cpu usage because I didn't do that. So I'm not sure if it is running at 100% all the time. Also, I haven't tested wireless on it yet, so it may not work either. I've been using a wire.
I did read on the Ubuntu forums that people had trouble installing wireless on it, but eventually got it to work with ndiswrapper. I have not worked on this yet in OpenSuse.

I am running OpenSuse 10.3.
I did use an external DVD drive to install from. I just borrowed it from my company for a night. I connected it with USB.

Trizon · 05-18-2008, 09:25 PM

I can now confirm that my cpu is not running at 100% utilization all the time. It is running just fine. I am monitoring this with the "top" command from the shell. I just thought I would post an update.
I have not tried wireless yet.

HenchmenResourc · 05-27-2008, 11:57 PM

Which drivers did you download from the VIA site, I have been unable to get the one I downloaded to work at all, everytime I install them Xorg fails to start at all? Is there any special trick you had to do to get them to work?

kdingo · 06-05-2008, 09:11 PM

Curious. I have an HP2133 and I wiped it and installed openSUSE 10.3. Display worked out of the box for me. Installation detected it as a 17" 5:4 display (1280x764) at 65535 colors. I changed it to the lowest screen size, 12", and bumped the colors up to 16 million. It worked without problems.

However, I can confirm that wireless isn't working. Syslog is saying that it cannot find a firmware file. Since I am kinda old-fashioned, I am using the traditional ifup method.

Code:

soma:/etc/sysconfig/network # tail /var/log/messages
May  5 18:35:35 soma ifup-dhcp: . 
May  5 18:35:35 soma ifup-dhcp: . 
May  5 18:35:37 soma ifup-dhcp: . 
May  5 18:35:40 soma syslog-ng[2159]: last message repeated 2 times
May  5 18:35:40 soma ifup-dhcp: no IP address yet... backgrounding. 
May  5 18:35:40 soma firmware.sh[6877]: Cannot find  firmware file 'bcm43xx_microcode5.fw'
May  5 18:35:40 soma kernel: bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
May  5 18:35:40 soma kernel: bcm43xx: core_up for active 802.11 core failed (-2)
May  5 18:35:40 soma ifup: Cannot enable interface eth0.
May  5 18:35:40 soma ifup-route: interface eth0 is not up

Also here is my ifcfg-eth0 file. Yeah, some reason it changed from eth1 after switching from SUSE Enterprise Desktop.

Code:

soma:~ # cat /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0
BOOTPROTO='dhcp'
BROADCAST=''
ETHTOOL_OPTIONS=''
IFPLUGD_PRIORITY='10'
IPADDR=''
MTU=''
NAME='Hewlett-Packard Company BCM4312 802.11a/b/g'
NETMASK=''
NETWORK=''
REMOTE_IPADDR=''
STARTMODE='hotplug'
USERCONTROL='yes'
WIRELESS_AP=''
WIRELESS_AUTH_MODE='open'
WIRELESS_BITRATE='auto'
WIRELESS_CA_CERT=''
WIRELESS_CHANNEL=''
WIRELESS_CLIENT_CERT=''
WIRELESS_CLIENT_KEY=''
WIRELESS_CLIENT_KEY_PASSWORD=''
WIRELESS_DEFAULT_KEY='0'
WIRELESS_EAP_AUTH=''
WIRELESS_EAP_MODE=''
WIRELESS_ESSID='xxxx'
WIRELESS_FREQUENCY=''
WIRELESS_KEY=''
WIRELESS_KEY_0='xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-76'
WIRELESS_KEY_1=''
WIRELESS_KEY_2=''
WIRELESS_KEY_3=''
WIRELESS_KEY_LENGTH='128'
WIRELESS_MODE='Managed'
WIRELESS_NICK=''
WIRELESS_NWID=''
WIRELESS_PEAP_VERSION=''
WIRELESS_POWER='yes'
WIRELESS_WPA_ANONID=''
WIRELESS_WPA_IDENTITY=''
WIRELESS_WPA_PASSWORD=''
WIRELESS_WPA_PSK=''

My installation is pretty much vanilla at this point. Google isn't showing much about this sort of problem yet, so I will update here if I am able to get past the wireless thing. If not, maybe 10.4 will fix this.

rash.m2k · 06-06-2008, 04:58 AM

Wireless work 100% with ndiswrapper!

Just get the drivers from the HP page, cabextract to get to the .inf file and install.

Will not work with WPA in a hidden mode (well it does but you need to mess about).

Change it to WPA2 and you will be fine. Wireless does not connect first time but 2nd/3rd attempt will connect and work very well.

BTW i'm using openSUSE 11.

kdingo · 06-06-2008, 12:32 PM

Thanks. ndiswrapper worked, although I had some quirks getting it to work.

The kernel was loading the alternate driver (bcm43xx). Had to remove the driver with 'rmmod bcm43xx' and blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
wlan0 wouldn't start up because it was missing its config file. Copying my old ifcfg-eth0 to ifcfg-wlan0 did the trick, and runnning 'ifup wlan0' and then 'iwconfig' showed that everything was set up and I had an IP address.

I hope this helps anyone else with similar problems.

HenchmenResourc · 06-10-2008, 12:30 PM

To get the wireless working under openSUSE 10.3 you can down load a RPM with the correct driver from the openSUSE build service http://software.opensuse.org/search and do a search for "compat-wireless." Once you have the appropriate package installed, then as root run the command '/usr/sbin/b43load b43' If the wireless does not turn on after that you can run the command '/usr/sbin/b43enable' That should get you up and running with wireless.

To make the correct driver load when the computer boots create a loader script:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: wireless
# Required-Start: $network
# Required-Stop: $network
# Default-Start: 2 3 5
# Description: Initiate Wireless card
### END INIT INFO

case "$1" in
'start')
	/usr/sbin/b43load b43
	;;
'stop')
	;;
*)
	echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
	;;
esac
exit 0

Save the script in the /etc/init.d folder calling it something unique that you will remember ("wireless" worked for me) then use the runlevel editor in YaST (yast --> System --> System Services) to enable it for runlevel 5. Next time you restart the wireless should start with the system.

artanberisha2004 · 06-11-2008, 12:33 AM

Hi there Trizon, i have bought the same thing the HP2133 and i have SUSE Linux also but i have a problem with the camera, i tried to install the driver you mentioned on your post, but it still does not work. I have never used Linux before and i need some help being able to install this thing correctly. Please give me as much as information how you installed it in your as you can.

Thanks

Artan

artanberisha2004 · 06-11-2008, 01:10 AM

Hello there Everyone,

My name is Artan, i am from Switzerland and i have bought HP 2133 mini Pc a week ago and it had SUSE, Linux version 10 pre loaded and i had no recovery Cd come with, i don't know if that is normal..
Also at the moment everything works fine, except the Camera(VGA) does not work and also i tried to download the driver that Trizon mentioned in his post but honestly i did open somefiles and i have no clue how to figure this thing out and check if the VGA has been fixed and see if it works. How do i check if the CPU is runnig 100 % by the way, i have no idea how is that done also. I am sorry i am asking too many questions but i guess i am dumb when it comes to LINUX.

Also is it worth using Linux and having to learn everything one by one, or should i try to download XP on it.

Please let me know all the info that can help me out with this matter.

sporks · 06-25-2008, 04:26 PM

Afternoon all.

I've had my Mini-Note for over a month now except I was using OzOS on it. I just recently installed openSUSE when 11.0 came out.

My CPU does scale, but I had to add this to the kernel line in the /boot/grub/menu.lst

Code:

acpi_osi="!Windows 2006"

That's from the Ubuntu Wiki entry for the 2133. If you recompile the kernel and enable the Via C7 scaling you shouldn't need it, however that module has it's own problems freezing up the computer. So you either need to set the minimum speed to be the second lowest or use the default cpu-freq module which this code in the menu.lst will enable.

As noted, the wireless works with Ndiswrapper. There are several versions of the Broadcom chips used so it can be tricky to figure out which one is needed. Luckily mine just uses the one from hp/Compaq.

artanberisha2004, it is normal not to get recovery CDs with it, but if you contact hp they will send them to you.

Now maybe someone can help me.

I downloaded the patches for the openSUSE 11.0 RC Via Chrome9 drivers. They applied, compiled and loaded. The AGP will load at boot and if I modprobe the Chrome9 driver it will load and indicates that the drm module uses it.

However, I still can't get direct rendering to work. When I run sax2 it still returns a Vesa board not the Chrome9 HC. The hardware info correctly detects the Chrome9 HC. If I try to use "via" for the driver in my xorg.conf it won't start X.

Running GLXgears give me about 175 FPS. glxinfo indicates Mesa is doing indirect rendering but no direct rendering is enabled.

The driver patch only comes with instructions on how to build the modules for the kernel. Nothing about using them. It just says stick them in /lib/modules... and it will load at boot time.