Ubuntu on HP Mini 210 - Taming the fierce Koala

Bad Koala! Nasty Koala!

I got an HP mini 210 last weekend and of course the first thing I had to do, was getting rid of Windows 7 Starter. Initially I wanted to give Easy Peasy a try, but it didn't boot properly. So I switched to the next best thing, which is Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" Netbook Remix.

Before kissing windows 7 good-bye for good (HP doesn't provide neither Windows7 nor any driver CDs), I wanted to make sure that Ubuntu would support the hardware. So I created a bootable USB stick with Unetbootin. In the live CD environment almost everything worked nicely. Most importantly wifi ran out of the box with the proprietary Broadcom STA driver. Suspend & resume also worked. The only thing that I noticed was that the multitouch pad didn't work. So I went along and installed Karmic. To my surprise the wireless driver failed to load! Just great. Fortunately for me, I knew that the driver had to be somewhere after all it ran in the live image. After a little searching I found it in /media/usb/pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/.

You can install it directly from Nautilus or in the shell. Whatever you prefer. After that, wireless should work.

The Good - Things that work Out of the Box™

Just like its namesake the Karmic Koala is pretty tame already and many things worked:

• Wireless
• Ethernet
• Suspend/Resume
• Sound
• Webcam
• Microphone
• Bluetooth
• SD/MMC/MS/xD card reader
• USB
• Touchpad (single touch and no right click)

Moreover, the Mini 210 has SIM card slot for mobile Broadband. I haven't tested that because I'm not using such a service.

The Bad - Stuff I could fix

Touchpad

Solution #1. Initially, presumed that fixing the Touchpad was just a matter of installing the Synaptics driver. But that didn't help. After some googling, I found a quick and dirty fix here. Essentially it suggests adding "options psmouse proto=exps" to psmouse.modprobe like so:

$ sudo echo options psmouse proto=exps > /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.modprobe

I call this quick and dirty because it will essentially make the OS treat the touchpad like a PS mouse. It also breaks the edge-scrolling. A feature I can't live without.

Solution #2. After some more searching I discovered a touchpad driver patch on the Ubuntu forums. You can download and apply the patch and then hand roll your own driver. This will fix left/right clicks and edge-scrolling. But real multitouch doesn't seem to be currently supported.

The Ugly - Issues I couldn't fix

Bluetooth is gone after suspend

I also noticed that the Bluetooth device is only available after a fresh reboot. This is not really a problem for me since I don't normally use any Bluetooth peripherals. I didn't find any solutions for the problem. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure what the root cause is...

Short Battery Life

I saved the worst part for last. I noticed that the battery life is not nearly a good as it is supposed to be. I have a 6 cell lithium ion battery which should last around 8+ hours. Effectively, I only get about half that.

I installed a tool called powerttop. It combines various sources of information from the kernel into one convenient screen so that you can see how well your system is doing at saving power, and which components are the biggest problem. Running powertop on my system revealed that the kernel spends half the time (i.e. half the battery) scheduling!

After further digging I discovered that this was a well known regression bug that affects various Atom based netbooks by different manufacturers. Apparently this was no problem in Jaunty. Hopefully the bug will be fixed with the next Ubuntu release which is due April 30th. If it isn't, I likely will revert to Jaunty for better or worse.

Conclusion
All in all, Karmic runs ok on the HP Mini. Although there a couple of hurdles that are very difficult to overcome by the average user.