unbuntu linux 4.10 on an HP nc4000

The nc4000 is a nice little ultralight laptop with some pretty good specs. I chose it mainly because it was one of the most inexpensive ultralight laptops with a 3 year international warranty (which I hope will keep it going for years to come). Aside from the standard specs, my machine is configured with:

I'm a newbie to linux and have experimented with a couple of distributions of linux including Suse 9.1 and Mandrake 10.0, but I think I've finally found usability, stability and performance with ubuntu 4.10. Here are some notes on installing ubuntu on this little machine.

Partitioning

I chose the following setup for partitioning:

/dev/hda1 – 512M linux swap

/dev/hda2 – 8GB linux boot mounted to /

/dev/hda3 – 20GB linux data mounted to /home

The reason why I chose to split out the hard disk is to create a partition just for user data so I don't have to go about backing up everything each time I want to try out a new distribution. This has worked well for reinstallations of Suse and works for ubuntu. You just have to be careful when repartitioning and make sure you mount hda3 back to /home.

Installation

The installation is pretty easy. I didn't have any major problems here. Onto the devices. Here's what lspci reports:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device cbb2 (rev 02)

0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 340M]

0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)

0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]

0000:00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation M5457 AC'97 Modem Controller

0000:00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

0000:00:0b.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711M1 SmartCardBus MultiMediaBay Controller (rev 20)

0000:00:0b.1 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711M1 SmartCardBus MultiMediaBay Controller (rev 20)

0000:00:0b.2 System peripheral: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711Mx MultiMediaBay Accelerator

0000:00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)

0000:00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 PMU

0000:00:12.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)

0000:00:12.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)

0000:00:12.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 04)

0000:00:13.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03)

0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 340M

CPU

This works great out of the box and you can load an applet in a panel to monitor the current frequency. I've also installed the precompiled version of the i686 kernel. Just add the linux-686 and linux-restricted-modules-686 (for wireless with madwifi) debian packages in Synaptic.

ACPI

ACPI is enabled by default in ubuntu and it seems to throttle the CPU well. I haven't tested suspend or standby, but anticipate they probably won't work to well. It seems that there is more to be sorted out the ACPI implementation.

Video

No problems here...it seems that the setup of X and gnome seems faster than anything in KDE with Suse. That was one of the pleasant surprises I discovered after installing ubuntu. Scrolling and window refreshes are pretty smooth on par with Windows XP. KDE always seemed slow to me. I haven't tried dual-head yet but will report in when I do.

I had poked around about using the 3D but it doesn't look hopeful. I won't really use that feature anyway since this is not a gaming laptop.

Sound

This is automatically detected by ubuntu and configured to work perfectly with the volume control applet in gnome. The volume control is also able to separately control speaker and headphone volume, a nice plus.

DVD/CD-RW

I had some problems with this initially. Reading data was fine, but I wasn't able to rip audio CDs using Sound Juicer. With the help of someone in #ubuntu on IRC, I found that the sg module needed to be loaded for it to work correctly. Using sudo, edit the /etc/modules and add an extra line that says sg. It rips CDs somewhat on the slow side at about 2.5x though, but the sound has no defects or anything.

I have multimedia installed per this FAQ, but I haven't tested DVD playback yet. I also haven't burned a CD yet either.

Ethernet

This works fine out of the box with the tg3 driver.

Wireless

This is detected by ubuntu and is setup with the ath_pci driver.

This works except that the GUI wireless utilities in ubuntu don't work too well. They always seem to freeze on me even when I enter everything into the GUI. After some research, best bet is to set up profiles in /etc/network/interfaces. First, just do an sudo ifup ath0, even if it doesn't work. Then you can scan for networks using iwlist ath0 scan. Once you've found your network, set up a profile in /etc/network/interfaces using sudo. For example:

mapping ath0

map HOME home

map OFFICE office


iface home inet dhcp

name Wireless LAN card

wireless_essid ringo

wireless_key XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

wireless_ap xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx


iface office inet dhcp

name Wireless LAN card

wireless_essid linksys

wireless_key off

wireless_ap off


Then just start up the profile you want by entering sudo ifup ath0=home as desired. Note: It doesn't just work after editing the /etc/network/interfaces file. You have to restart. (I haven't figured out a workaround for this.)

Modem

This doesn't work out of the box with the Networking setup in gnome. Bdale Garbee has a great tutorial on how to get the internal modem to work here. I've also installed Gnome PPP to control wvdial. You can download Gnome PPP here and install it using sudo dpkg -i <package>. I found that you have to save the password or Gnome PPP won't get past the password prompt in wvdial. I haven't tested it with a real ISP yet, but it definitely dials.

Hardware Buttons

The volume control buttons on the nc4000 also work within gnome. Just head over to the Keyboard Shortcuts setup and set them up in there by pressing the corresponding buttons. Unfortunately the lock, wireless, and presentation buttons aren't detected by the Keyboard Shortcuts setup. I'll have to investigate some more on how to get them mapped.


updated 11/18/2004 – work in progress!