Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade on the HP Mini-Note 2133
Linux, Open Source, Ubuntu April 24th, 2009A few days ago I upgraded the Ubuntu partition on my HP Mini-Note 2133 from 8.10 to the release candidate of 9.04 (i386). The upgrade itself went very smoothly, for the most part – I ran Update Manager, answered a few questions and waited for the upgrade to complete. With the fairly pedestrian 1.2Ghz VIA C7 CPU the upgrade took around an hour and a half.
When I rebooted, I spotted the first problem – GRUB presented me with the kernels from 8.10 (2.6.27.*) but not the 9.04 kernel (2.6.28.*). During the installation I had elected not to overwrite GRUB’s menu.lst, thinking that it would still get updated when the kernel package was configured. Oddly, that didn’t happen. My solution was to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add entries for the 9.04 default kernel (doing a dpkg-reconfigure on the kernel package would probably also have fixed it).
Once I had booted the correct kernel, I tackled the second problem – X didn’t work. With 8.10 I had been using the proprietary VIA DRM kernel module, which enabled hardware-accelerated 3D on the 2133’s Chrome9 chipset, but it didn’t work with the updated 9.04 kernel. I moved my /etc/X11/Xorg.conf out of the way and restarted X, which then started correctly with sane defaults (newer releases of X.Org no longer require a configuration file). Rather pleasingly, the OpenChrome driver being used by X.Org started with the correct 1280×768 resolution. The one downside of not using the VIA module is that compiz et al. don’t work – not a big issue for now and one that should be rectified once VIA update their DRM kernel module for 9.04’s kernel. One possible workaround is to boot the most recent kernel from 8.10 (which is still installed), but I haven’t tried that yet.
The third problem, and the most annoying, relates to the 2133’s Broadcom wireless. With 8.10 I had been using ndiswrapper and it worked perfectly. For some reason, as soon as I tried to connect to my home wireless network after upgrading to 9.04, WPA authentication failed (I kept getting prompted for my key and the key I entered was never saved). I then switched to using the Broadcom STA driver, which authenticates successfully, but exhibits a few problems of its own – it often looses the connection to my access point and sometimes doesn’t work correctly after resuming from a suspend. I’m going to switch back to using ndiswrapper to see if it’ll work with a bit more coaxing.
Overall, I’m reasonably happy with the upgrade – other than the issues mentioned above, it went smoothly and the system is working well. The only issue that’s really causing me pain at the moment is the wireless (but then it is Broadcom…).
April 24th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I upgraded my HP 2133 to 9.04 today. I was using the via proprietary driver but when I rebooted after the install, it went back to using the vesa driver. I removed xforcevesa from the grub menu.lst and put “openchrome” in xorg.conf and it then displayed the 1280×768 screen. But openchrome does not seem to support output through the VGA port. Is there a fix for this or do I have to wait for the proprietary driver to be updated?
April 24th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Thanks for the info – I didn’t have xforcevesa in my menu.lst (my 8.10 install was done in text mode using the alternate ISO).
According to the Gentoo Wiki, the OpenChrome driver does support an external monitor – haven’t tried it yet, but it may be worth a look.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:38 am
Thanks for the link. I tweaked the xorg.conf shown there and now I get a display on the external monitor. The only problem is that the cursor does not display.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I haven’t had a chance to test my 2133 with an external monitor, but it may be worth using Option “SWCursor” in the appropriate Device stanza in xorg.conf. I’ll hopefully have a chance to fiddle a bit later today – if I get it working, I’ll be sure to let you know.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I just upgraded to 9.04 after having used 8.10 with the via kernel module. Under 8.10 I could not get the proper screen resolution, and had to make do with about 3/4 of the screen space that my monitor was capable of.
When I upgraded to 9.04, I had no graphics initially, as I had kind of expected, so I just reinstalled the via drivers, restarted and now my proper screen resolution is displayed, AND I can use compiz!
Strange sidenote, previously under 8.10, the only way I could get my proper screen resolution, was to plug in an external monitor, and then restart my computer. It would then display correctly on my laptop screen until I had to restart again.