Ubuntu on HP Compaq nc8230

Version .14, May 5, 2005.

My Compaq N610c was showing its age, so I asked our laptop folks what a good new HP notebook to choose. As I also have a TC1100 tablet, I was interested in the nc8230 as a somewhat larger form factor laptop (but still decently light). It is a commercial laptop, which implies slightly higher tolerance to abuse, as a corporate laptop is carried around more than consumer laptops typically are. I'm also working on X development, and wanted a high performance PCI-E graphics chip.

Being adventurous, I went for a brand new model of a new laptop series, a sometime risky thing to do. So far, while a bit of an adventure as it is pretty leading edge, I'm reasonably happy with it.

This laptop is slightly wider than the nc6000 series laptops; one of the compensations is a larger screen, and another are better built in speakers. The screen is very high quality, even better than what I had on the N600c. None the less, it is under 6lb in weight. The nc8230 uses a ATI Radeon X600 graphics chip, rather than the ATI Mobility FireGL V5000 found in the nc8240. It is ACPI only: no APM bios support.

One really cool feature this laptop is a 3 button touchpad!!! It feels like a serious luxury, to me...

Here's the summary of the full specifications:

At A Glance

Microsoft Windows XP Professional,
Windows XP Home Edition (select countries only), or
FreeDos
Sleek industrial design weighing 5.8 lb/2.6 kg and 1.1-inch/28 mm thin (at front)
Intel® Pentium® M processors 730 to 770*
Mobile Intel 915PM Express Chipset
ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600 graphics controller with 64 MB or 128 MB of video memory
Optional integrated 802.11 a/b/g or 802.11 b/g wireless LAN module
Support for optional Intel Centrino™ mobile technology
Optional integrated Bluetooth®
256-MB DDR2 SDRAM, upgradeable to 2048-MB maximum
Up to 80-GB 5400 rpm, user-removable hard drive
15.4-inch wide screen display
IEEE 1394 Port
Integrated Secure Digital (SD) slot
Security features include integrated Smart Card Reader and optional Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Embedded Security Chip
NetXtreme Gigabit PCI Express Ethernet Controller
Dual pointing devices on nc8230
Support for ultra-slim MultiBay II devices
Protected by a three-year standard parts and labor warranty - certain restrictions and exclusions apply.


What's Special
Increased viewing area with 15.4-inch wide display Latest PCI Express technology and DDR2 400-MHz & 533-MHz memory support Enhanced security features: HP ProtectTools Integrated Smart Card Reader Optional Embedded Security features Ease of use features: Ambient light sensor HP Fast Charge Technology HP Wireless Assistant HP power down NIC technology HP MultiBay II Easy Release Up to 4.5 hours of battery life with standard 8-cell high capacity Lithium-Ion battery HP Mobile Print Driver for on-the-go printing Integrated reliability features: HP Mobile Data Protection System HP Panel Protection System Scratch-resistant keyboard deck using In-mold Lamination Magnesium-alloy display enclosure HP spill-resistant keyboard with Mylar film Support for new HP docking solutions and HP Travel Battery

Unfortunately, the internal configurations (I'm an HP employee) did not admit to either the 128meg VRAM graphics option or the 1920x1200 resolution screen.

So what I have is:

2ghz Pentium M processor
ATI Radeon X600 graphics with 64 meg of VRAM
1680x1050 flat panel
60 gig disk
Centrino Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG 802.11 a/b/g wireless (built in)

lspci says:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub PCI Express Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev d3)
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 3150
0000:02:04.0 Network controller: Intel Corp.: Unknown device 4223 (rev 05)
0000:02:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8031
0000:02:06.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8032
0000:02:06.3 Unknown mass storage controller: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8033
0000:02:06.4 0805: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8034
0000:02:06.5 Communication controller: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8035
0000:10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 167d (rev 11)

Pre-installation

As I sometimes want to poke at Windows, I didn't mind getting the Windows version. I repartitioned the disk using Partition Magic 7 without incident. I made one major mistake at this point, forgetting to allocate a swap partition, which I wanted later for suspend to disk.

Ubuntu Hoary 5.04 installation

Base installation went smoothly.

Working "out of the box" include:

X.org 6.8.2 with the flatpanel (here is my xorg.conf file, with synaptics configuration (see below))
802.11a/b/g wireless,
ethernet (tested at both 100meg and gigabit),
USB
Microphone
stereo out
the Gnome keyboard shortcut applet was used to set up the mute and volume control buttons
the brightness controls (fnF9 and fnF10)
travel battery

Having screwed up with forgetting to create a swap partition, I recovered from this, and then got suspend to disk working.

Ubuntu has by far the best user contributed "here's how to really configure your system" page I've seen in its
"Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide". Following this cookbook results in a very nice system indeed, and Ubuntu is my favorite desktop Linux distribution.

Linux seems to be doing a fine job at controlling the processor speed, which varies between 800mhz and 2ghz depending on CPU load.

I installed a 686 kernel: /proc/version currently says:

Linux version 2.6.10-5-686 (buildd@terranova) (gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-8ubuntu2)) #1 Tue Apr 5 12:27:02 UTC 2005

Ubuntu comes with Gnome 2.10, X.org 6.8.2, and is very up to date in general. Ubuntu is Debian derived.

I've also installed Codeweaver's Crossover Office version 4.1 and Microsoft Office on my system, and it is working fine.

Problems

Synaptics touch pad driver for X.org

Out of the box, the synaptics driver did not function correctly. I would get a button 2 event when a button one event was called when tapping on the touchpad, which will quickly drive one to distraction. I updated to the latest synaptics driver (0.4.1) and had the same problem. Peter Osterlund was kind enough to get me a patch that fixed it, which I presume will appear in the next release, and I let Daniel Stone at Canonical know about the problem. I'm now a happy camper.

Suspend to RAM

Suspend to RAM does not seem to completely work; I haven't experimented by removing drivers (yet). It seems to suspend, but on resume, the flat panel is never re enabled. This may be a X driver problem.

Suspend to Disk

Suspend to disk works, though on resume, it may leave you on the wrong VT, and you may get some random stuff on the screen in the process of resume (a cosmetic problem at worst).

The other serious issue I noticed after a day or so is that Linux may get confused about the state of the fan and fail to sufficiently cool the processor (REALLY BAD), allowing it to get very hot. This might be an ACPI bios bug; but I see from some googling reports (on other distributions) of similar problems, so it sounds like a generic Linux ACPI bug instead.

For the moment, I turned on the fan in the BIOS, and am no longer suspending to disk, and have let HP's engineer responsible for Linux on this laptop know of the problem. Ubuntu has picked up the fast boot work, so I'll live with this for the moment.

ATI Proprietary X.org driver

I tried the ATI fglrx driver in ubuntu, and found it would not turn on my flat-panel. I tried the later driver (early April, 2005) on the ATI web site; same problem. So I guess I won't be happy until I get a later driver from ATI, which I will be beta testing for them soon.

Untested (so far)

Some hardware on this notebook I can't or haven't test.

This includes bluetooth (which I'll probably test sometime by borrowing some hardware)
1394 firewire (I don't have any access to hardware).
docking station parallel port (I may order this option sometime). Note that the parallel port is on the docking station, not on the main unit.
Modem (I never use dialup anymore, though I suppose I might have to traveling sometime and should test.
Video out from the graphics chip (I'll probably test it soon, before my next talk.
external VGA out (I will be testing this soon, but probably with the ATI proprietary driver).
The wireless control button
TPM module (I think a driver has just gone into the Linux kernel)
The SD interface. Some work MMC/SD started on the iPAQ handheld running Linux and SD support had proceeded the specification's availability using information that had been found on the Web, but SD support is in early days, now that SDIO specifications are available from the SD consortium without NDA. Some people are beginning to have luck, but the nc8230 has a TI7621, for which I don't know of a driver.

Please send me any comments or additions to this page.

Jim Gettys - Cambridge Research Lab, HP Labs