Six Different Linux Distributions, one HP 2133 Mini-Note Netbook

My HP 2133 Mini-Note with WSVGA (1024x600) display has been out on loan for several months. It came back a week or so ago, and as it had missed the latest wave of Linux distribution updates, I decided to reload it from scratch. It originally came with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10), and NO WINDOWS (Hooray!). I had preserved SLED 10 in a small partition "just in case", but it is now so old that it would not be of any use whatever may happen, so I wiped it as well, and started from a completely clean disk.

The HP Mini-Note is not the easiest netbook to support, with its VIA C7-M CPU, Chrome 9 graphic controller and Broadcom 4312 wireless networking adapter. So far I have loaded the following six Linux distributions. All were loaded from Live USB media, all installed and configured quite easily and all handled the hardware with varying degrees of tweaking and human intervention. I have noted the peculiarities of each installation below. I would like to emphasize that all of these screen shots were taken on the 2133, they show the actual results of the installation of each of these distributions.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Very easy installation, the only thing that didn't work straight away was the Broadcom wireless adapter, and Ubuntu notified me that proprietary drivers are available for that. One perhaps not totally obvious note, you have to be connected to the Internet in order to use the Hardware Drivers utility to download and install the Broadcom driver, so make sure you set up either a wired network or a wireless broadband connection first. The alternative, of course, would be to download the package to another computer, transfer the files to the 2133 and then install from that.



Linux Mint 9 (Isadora): As a derivative of Ubuntu 10.04, this installs and configures in almost exactly the same way. I included it here primarily because it is the distribution that I prefer to use, and as an example of the "Standard" Gnome desktop on the Mini-Note.



Fedora 13 (Goddard): Known for being innovative and at the leading edge of Linux development, it was no surprise that this distribution installed just as easily as Ubuntu and Mint. Again, the only thing missing was the Broadcom drivers, and there is a good description on the Fedora Unity community web page of how to fetch and install the drivers.



SimplyMEPIS 8.5: This is another of my personal favorites, but it took a bit more effort that the previous three. The biggest problem was the Chrome 9 graphic adapter, there is no driver for it in the distribution or MEPIS repositories, and the one in the Debian repositories is old (902) and doesn't work properly. I finally found the latest openchrome driver in the Mepis Community Repository, but even then it didn't show up in Synaptic when I added that repo, I had to actually download the package files and install it that way. The good news is, once that was done the display worked just fine. I think I might have had to fetch the Broadcom drivers for this one as well, but to be honest once I had them installed the first time (on Fedora), I just copied the contents of /lib/firmware/b43 from there to the other partitions as necessary.



Mandriva 2010.1 (Spring) RC2: This is still a Release Candidate, but it installed and worked easily. It got the screen resolution wrong initially, but all I had to do was go into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and comment out all of the "Subsection "Display" lines, and the X server then got the resolution correct on its own. It might have needed the Broadcom drivers to be added... I hate getting older and losing my memory...



openSuSE 11.3 Milestone 7: Another pre-release, this one has not yet reached the Release Candidate stage. That makes installation a bit more tricky, because once again the openchrome drivers are not included in the base distribution. The simple solution is to pick them up from the openSuSE Build Service, but be sure to set it to look for the Factory version, not 11.2, as they have different X.org versions, so the older drivers will not work. Also, the Broadcom drivers are not included in the base distribution, but you can get them easily using the install_bcm43xx_firmware command. As you can see from the following screen shot, the default font and icon sizes are a bit large for the small low-res screen, as well.



So, there they are, all working very nicely on the little Mini-Note now. I think this provides an important illustration of how quickly Linux develops support for new devices. When I first got an HP 2133, a bit over a year ago, it was difficult and tedious to install Linux, and nearly impossible to find drivers for some parts of it. Today, installing Linux is basically a snooze, it took somewhere between 30 minutes and two hours, depending on how many drivers had to be downloaded separately after installation.

jw 8/6/2010