Fixing Devices

Saturday, 5th april

I have been using this excellent guide to the TX 1000 to help me through this:

http://www.kellyandsopho.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=LinuxOnHpPaviliontx1000z

Trackpad:

- disabled tap to click (it was driving me crazy!)

added some lines to my etc/X11/xorg.conf file in the section Driver "Synaptics":

option "TapButton1" "0"

option "TapButton2" "0"

option "TapButton3" "0"

Sound:

Using Yast2 - discard the intel sound card, then add a new one - pick nVidia MCP51(hda) from the list.

I added the option model=3stack (didn't try without it, though - might not be necessary.)

The heaphone sockets don't work, and I haven't tested the sound input either.

USB:

adding pci=nommconf and irqfixup on grub boot options fixed unrecognised usb devices.

Wifi:

Got wifi working by using ndiswrapper-gtk with driver file from a Dell website

http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXE

(just open the exe as a zip and extract the .inf and both the .sys files, then point ndiswrapper-gtk at the .inf)

TouchScreen:

The touchscreen technology in the tx2000 is completely different to that in the tx1000 - its a wacom device. Yes - there are 2 Wacom devices; 1 for fingers, the other for the pen. It looks like there is currently no linux support foreither, so we'll just have to wait. :'(

I think this is the relevant thread.

Let the Linux Commence!

Friday, 4th April

Booted Ubuntu i386 Install disc in order to use gparted - selected 'Launch Ubuntu in Safe Gfx Mode' there was a big, long scary pause (5mins?) with a black screen when starting gnome/X half way through. But booted to the gnome desktop OK. Eventually.

Partition Plan:

|42Gb Vista NTFS|120Gb Main files store FAT32|25Gb Mac HFS|10Gb Home EXT3;15Gb linux Distro 1 EXT3;15Gb Linux Distro 2 EXT3;5gb SWAP|

| = primary partition bounds

; = logical partition bounds

Notes:

* GParted crashed first attempt (I had unchecked the Round To Cylinders option for the Extended partition - don't know why I did that - I left rounding on for all the other partitions *including* all the logical partitions inside the extended one!) Second time round I left rounding on on everything and it all worked.

*Had to force quit gnome when leaving ubuntu - froze to a black screen on shutdown.

- Booted Vista to make sure it was still OK with my new partitions.

- Booted Suse10.3 x64 install Dvd: black screened a couple of times, but eventually ran the installer

- The installed system would crash early in the startup sequence - (in hindsight, I probably just needed to add noapic to the grub boot paramiters)

- launched Failsafe mode - set up users, etc. using terminal version of YaST

- logged in as root and ran sax2

- added grub boot options noapic nolapic to boot - success!

- Things to fix:

 touchpad scroll zones

 touchscreen

 wacom stylus

 wifi connection

 gfx card support

 

First Boot

Thursday, 3rd April

Purchase!

Got home, unboxed it - lovely!

First big decision - I had read somewhere that its worth booting a linux cd and repartitioning your HD BEFORE the first boot into Vista:

- The Tx2050 comes with 10Gb of compressed vista install data on a partition, and an otherwise empty hard disc. The first time you power on the machine, it will decompress the contents of this into 25gb of the main partition (mostly bloatware) takes about an hour!

- As part of this install some unmoveable system files will be written into the middle of the hard disk, making it difficult to shrink the partition smaller than about 50% of the hard disc - if you want a small Windows partition, you have a problem!

 There are ways of shrinking the partition beyond the 50% mark, and I wanted to boot into Vista first so that I could just make sure my new computer had no defects BEFORE I started installing weird software.

Booting Vista:

By a long way this is the slowest, klunkiest out of the box experience I have ever had with a computer - just awful! You switch it on and it spends an hour chundering away installing bloatware. I then spent an hour and a half removing the bits I was sure I would never use (using Start->Control Panel->Programs), then I spent two and a half hours burning recovery discs.

Next I used Vista to shrink the windows partition - I wanted to get it down to 40Gb. It would only shrink to 120 at the first time of asking, but after shrinking to 120 and switching off virtual memory, I rebooted the computer, ran the defragmentation utility and then it would allow me to shrink to my preferred size. Other people have needed to use 3rd party partitioning software, but this worked for me.

Leo4All on my Desktop PC

Thursday, 3rd April

Leo4All osx86 - on my Dell 5150 Desktop.

I had a go at installing Leo4All on my desktop PC. Only 1 hitch - I got stuck in the Welcome screen (a lot of people do) so I booted with -s and manually set up root account, then everthing worked! ...well I booted the OS anyway!

- no sound

- no wifi

- no hardware rendering! This is the first time I have seen osX running in software - it really takes a lot of the shine off the gui!

- only using 1 core of my Pentium4

Play let me down

Wednesday, 2nd April

Play.com did a manual security check on my Visa Debit card - I ordered my computer on Friday night, my card still hasn't been cleared, and Play seem to have sold all their stock, without keeping one by for me! 

Scarily, the tx2050 has disappeared entirely from play's online catalogue - its not even listed as out of stock! I don't know what's going on there, but I have lost all confidence in Play's ability to sell anything bigger or more expensive than a dvd. :-/

I'm going to Comet to buy one over the counter tomorrow - it'll cost me a lot more, but still a good price.

It has begun!

Ok, this blog is for charting my experiences of trying to get Linux and MacOS X to run on my HP Pavilion TX2050 (the 2050 is simply the UK release of the TX2000)

I put in an order for the above machine this morninig after a little research.

Purchase Decision:

I wanted my next machine to be a MacBook, but they are a little too big (its the width and height of the open unit I find bothersome, not the weight or thickness) - if Apple still made a 12" MacBookPro I might have bought one of those. MacOS X is wonderful, and to choose a machine that doesn't run it is a bit of a wrench.

Anyway, having used several 15" laptops over the years, mostly as Desktop replacement machines I wanted something more portable - I have never used a tablet PC, but it seems like it might deliver the kind of user experience I am hankering after.

Expectations:

There are a few success stories on the net from people who have managed to get tx2000's to run Linux and OsX86 although it certainly doesn't seem to be the easiest machine to get working. I'm not sure if OsX86 will be stable enough for everyday usage. Looks like I'm in for a bumpy ride!

The wacom pen does not have linux drivers available yet, but hopefully that will be fixed in the coming months. In principle, most of the rest of the hardware looks like it might work... we'll see.

Next Steps:

- pick a Linux distro
- download all the necessary install stuff + burn DVDs
- decide on a partitioning strategy