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Ubuntu 10 04 Netbook Remix On An HP Mini 2140 Netbook Part 3

Now that I have Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed on my HP Mini 2140 netbook, I became aware of another thing about the HP that is different from my Lenovo S10-2 netbook, and that was the display size and clarity. At first I thought it was simply my imagination but after comparing the powered-up netbooks side by side, it became apparent that the display on the HP was very much sharper and was easier to read. It was also noticeable that the HPs screen was slightly smaller than the Lenovos - which was confirmed by the specification in the HP Mini 2140 Data Sheet. The HP has a 1024 x 576 pixels screen while the Lenovo has the normal (for a netbook, that is) 1024 x 600 pixels screen. Why this was so is not clear but the type of LCD panel used by HP resulted in the sharper and clearer display than the Lenovo - so I am not complaining :)

Another feature of the HP that differs from the Lenovo is the standard battery that came with the netbook. HP only supplies a 3-cell battery as standard while Lenovo supplies a 6-cell one. Obviously this has an impact on battery life under normal netbook usage. According to reports and reviews found on the web, the 3-cell battery on the HP was only good for about 2 hours under normal usage - compare this with an actual 4.5 hours which was actually obtained by me for the Lenovo. So, if I wanted to extend the battery life on the HP, I have to purchase the optional 6-cell battery. After making several inquiries, I discovered to my horror that such a battery cost around 25% of the actual cost of the netbook! Way to go HP! Is this your way of screwing your users? In retrospect, I should have expected this - after all, after working with HP for more than 20 years, I should know by now that HP stands for High Price.

Expect for the 6-cell battery price farce, I found several things to like about the HP Mini 2140 - which was a saving grace (else I would have just got rid of it). One, as I mentioned previously, was the sharp screen display. The other likable item was the keyboard - the keys were large and nice to use - unlike the somewhat soggy feel of the Lenovos keyboard. I also felt that the inclusion of the ExpressCard/54 slot as a nice feature to have - provided, of course, I can get actual ExpressCard/54 cards locally. As mentioned previously, I am looking for a 4-port USB ExpressCard/54 card in order to expand the number of available USB ports. More on this ExpressCard later.

Anyway, enough about the HP Mini - allow me to elaborate on my first impression of the new Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix (UNR) OS. The first and most noticable impression is the new color scheme (or theme). The standard brown scheme found in the previous version (9.10) has been replaced with a purple, gray, and orange theme called Ambiance. Personally, I prefer the old scheme but I could live with the new one. Fortunately the background could be easily be changed to almost anything I wish and I do have some nice images to serve as the background. This was the first thing I did on the netbook - copy my favorite images to my home folder (Pictures subfolder) and changed the background to my liking.

The next (and somewhat irritating) thing I noticed about the new UNR is that, for some reason or another, the Canonical team decided to place the windows control (maximize, minimize and close) buttons on top left side of the windows - instead of the usual (and familiar) top right side. According to reviews found on the web, the decision was to copy the Mac OS layout. It was also evident from the various posts on various user forums that this was not a popular decision. Fortunately, there is a way to restore the placement of the button back to the normal position. The procedure can be found at this link (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/).

As the HP netbook is to be a mobile device, battery life must be preserved at all time - which means that the power management utility in the new UNR must work correctly. This was tested next - the result was not very encouraging - in fact, it was downright disappointing. On my other netbook (the Lenovo S10-2), power management worked flawlessly with the UNR 9.10. When I close the lid of the Lenovo netbook, the system went to sleep. At the predetermined time it went into hibernation. With this power management I was able to make the battery last for the duration I am on the road. On the HP, closing the lid did not do anything - the only way I could put the HP netbook to sleep was to do it manually by pressing the Fn+F1 key combination. Opening the lid after manually putting the HP netbook to sleep did not wake it up - again I had to manually wake it up using the on/off button. To my alarm, I noted that it did not prompt me for a password upon waking up (as it is supposed to) - it just restored the last screen. Plainly, the 10.04 UNRs power management utility did not work as it was supposed to do.

After doing a bit of research on the web, I discovered that there was indeed a unresolved bug concerning the HP 2140 and its lid closing detection on UNR 10.04. It seems to be unique to the HP - other netbook did not seem to be affected. At the moment, it cannot be determined as to when this issue will be resolved. This fact alone put a bit of a damper for my plans for the HP Mini 2140 and I need to re-think them for my sleep-deprived netbook.

More to come ... stay tuned.

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Ubuntu 10 04 Netbook Remix On An HP Mini 2140 Netbook Part One

It was 5 months ago when Canonical announced the release of the Ubuntu 10.04 (codenamed Lucid Lynx) Linux OS - which also carried the LTS (Long Term Support) moniker. The Netbook Remix version was also released at the same time. At that time I was using the 9.10 Netbook Remix version (Karmic Kaola) on my Lenovo S10-2 Ideapad netbook and was very satisfied with it. Needless to say, I was tempted to upgrade to the 10.04 version - however, from experience, I decided to hold off for a few months until all the bugs have been ironed out from the OS.

Recently, I obtained a Hewlett-Packard Mini 2140 - a netbook similar to the Lenovo S10-2. My sister had purchased it because it was relatively cheap but was very disappointed with its small sized screen. After using it for a short while, she gave up and offered it to me. I now own 2 netbooks - one already running the Ubuntu 9.10 (the Lenovo) and the other running Windows XP (the HP). This situation presented me the opportunity to try out the Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix OS on the HP Mini.

The HP Mini 2140 is an Intel Atom based netbook and it uses a 1.6 Ghz N270 CPU. It also use the Intel 945GSE chipset with the GMA950 mobile graphics. For wireless connectivity, it utilize the Broadcom chipset. As you can see, these specifications are the same as for the Lenovo S10-2 with one major exception. The exception is the number of USB ports - only 2 is present on the HP while the Lenovo has 3. The space that would be required for the extra USB port on the HP is occupied by an ExpressCard/54 slot (with an SD cardslot immediately below it). Note that the Lenovo does not have an ExpressCard slot. It looks as if a USB hub is a must for the HP - or if a 54mm wide ExpressCard card with 4 USB ports is available, it would meet the need for extra USB ports.

In order to try out Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix on the HP Mini 2140, I purchased a brand new WD Scorpio Blue 500GB hard disk to replace the existing disk (which I carefully stored it just in case I need to use Windows XP again) in the HP netbook. I also replaced the 1GB memory stick in the HP with a 2GB stick. I also discovered that I simply could not locate a 54mm wide ExpressCard card with 4 USB ports anywhere here in Malaysia - only a 34mm wide version is available. Anyway I had a spare 4-port USB hub for use during the trial if needed. Thus armed with all the items mentioned, I then proceeded to download the ISO image of the Netbook Remix from the Ubuntu web site and a CDROM was created using Brasero (a CDROM burning software) on the Lenovo with an external CD burner attached. Instructions was also available on the download web site on how to create a USB drive for installing UNR from it. Just in case something happens to the external CDROM drive for the netbook, I also created the install USB drive.

I then proceeded to install the Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix on the HP Mini 2140 netbook. Happily, it was a success. The installation will be described in the next part of this blog ... stay tuned.

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Ubuntu 10 04 Netbook Remix On An HP Mini 2140 Netbook Part 4

As mentioned in my previous blog, I mentioned that I was disappointed with the inability of the HP Mini 2140 to enter sleep mode when the lid was closed and also mentioned that there was indeed a unresolved bug (#376793) concerning the HP 2140 and its lid closing detection on UNR 10.04. Intrigued, I decided to test whether this inability affected the previous UNR (version 9.10 codenamed Karmic Kaola). So out went the hard disk from the netbook and in its place I installed a spare blank hard disk that I had kept for such a test.

After installing the UNR 9.10, I updated the OS with the latest updates (after going through the process in getting the Broadcom wireless working as outlined in my older blogs) and then started testing the power management features. I found out that they worked perfectly! The netbook went to sleep when I closed the lid - unlike UNR 10.04. Clearly there was a problem in UNR 10.04 and NOT with the HP netbook.

The question now remains - shall I wipe out UNR 10.04 from the removed hard disk and use UNR 9.10, or continue using the already installed UNR 10.04 but always have to remember to put the netbook to sleep manually? There was one big advantage of using UNR 10.04 - it has Long Term Support (3 years support for the desktop). Battery conservation is a big issue here - if I forget to put the netbook to sleep manually, then there will be problems relating to inability to use the netbook in a remote site. Decisions, decisions, .....

More to come ... stay tuned.

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Ubuntu 10 04 Netbook Remix On An HP Mini 2140 Netbook Part Two

For the actual install, I used an external CDROM drive attached to the HP netbook. For internet connection, I use a Ethernet LAN cable to the netbook.

1) Placing the install CDROM in the external CDROM drive attached to the HP Mini, I powered it up and pressed the F9 key to access the boot menu. The USB CDROM drive was selected as the boot drive by pressing the Enter key after which the netbook proceeded to boot the OS. After a while an Install dialog box appeared giving choices of languages and 2 other options. The first is to try out Ubuntu 10.04 without making any changes to the HP and the other is to install Ubuntu 10.04 to the HP without trying it first. Note that:

(a) it is possible to install the OS later to the HP even if you select the first option (i.e., try out the OS) by selecting Install Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04 on the Favorites screen that appears first after starting.

(b) it is also possible to create a USB stick containing the same Netbook Remix image as the CD by using the Startup Disk Creator present in the Ubuntu 10.04 System screen. Note that the 7-steps install process itself is similar in both cases.

2) After making sure that the correct language was used, I then selected the correct location, keyboard layout, and then came the important disk space preparation. Note that the easiest way is to accept the default - i.e., Erase and use the entire disk. However, this would create partitions using the ext4 filesystem - the default filesystem used by Ubuntu 10.04. The problem with using this relatively new filesystem is that most popular disk cloning and backup system do not support ext4 yet. I found this out the hard way when I tried to clone and backup a Kubuntu 10.04 based system using my favorite cloning software - Arconis Home 2010. This software will simply fail to process an ext4 based hard disk. In order to avoid this I decided to partition my hard disk manually by selecting Specify partitions manually (advanced) and use the ext3 filesystem for the partitions. (If you do not plan to clone your hard disk or do not want to tinker with the manual method, then I suggest using the default method.) I will skip the details of actually making the partitions - it is only sufficient to say that I created 4 primary partitions for boot, root, swap and home. When the partitions have been specified, I then entered my user information, password and netbook name in the next step. Note that the Log in automatically option is selected by default - for security reason I changed this to Require password to log in instead. The actual install process began after clicking on the Install button on the next screen that appeared and the whole process took a while to complete.

3) When the install process was completed, a notice appeared on the screen saying so, and also notified that a restart was required. Upon pressing the Restart Now button, the netbook re-booted into the newly-installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix OS - after logging in, of course. One noticeable difference from the previous release 9.10, is that there was no startup sound - it has to be enabled by clicking on the speaker icon on the top right panel and selecting Sound Preference. On the dialog box that appeared, I selected Ubuntu in the Sound theme drop list box after which the startup sound was heard.

4) After a while at the desktop (2 or 3 minutes), two things happened. The first is that a flashing folder icon appeared next to the Ubuntu icon at the top left-hand side of the screen. This was the Update Manager telling me that there are updates available for the OS. The second thing was that a message appeared saying that restricted drivers is available and a new icon (which looks like a plug-in PCI card for a PC) appeared next to the mail envelope icon. This was the Hardware Drivers telling me that there are restricted drivers available for me to use - in fact, this is the driver for the Broadcom wireless chipset. For the moment I ignored the Hardware Drivers notification - instead the OS was updated using the Update Manager (via the Ethernet (LAN) internet access). As of September 2010, there were 272 updates to be installed - so this process took some time to complete. The kernel was also updated, so a reboot was required as soon as all updates were installed - which I did.

5) In the previous version of Ubuntu (9.10), the installation of the restricted driver for the Broadcom wireless chipset caused problems for my Lenovo netbook. This has been fixed in this version. The restricted drivers was installed by selecting System -> Hardware Drivers from the menu. The netbook started to search for available hardware driver and when found displayed the results - which turns out to be 2 type of drivers for the Broadcom wireless chipset. I selected the Broadcom STA wireless driver and then clicked on the Activate button. After entering my password, the drivers was downloaded and installed, after which a message appeared saying I need to reboot in order to activate the drivers. The Hardware Drivers window was closed and the netbook restarted. Once restarted and upon clicking on the network icon on the top panel, I saw a list of accessible wireless access points within range - I clicked on the one I wish to connect to, entered a password and I was connected to the internet wirelessly! No fuss - no freeze as in version 9.10! At this point I also disconnected the LAN connection.

All in all, installation was painless - kudos to the Ubuntu team for making it right this time - especially the restricted Broadcom wireless drivers. Of course, it would have been nicer if the wireless had been detected and the drivers installed automatically but this would be asking too much from Canonical.

More to follow ... stay tuned.

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