Howto's, experiences and more

With the new Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx in hand, it was time to evaluate how much would work out-of-the-box on it. My last experiences with this were less than satisfactory, but I also was aware that Linux came a long way since then.

So, jumping off the cliff, I installed the 32bit version on my laptop, and to my surprise, the installation was quick and painless and the system booted up smoothly and almost everything just worked !

So instead of giving you a list of what works, here is a list of what does not work :

- Wireless network
- Fingerprint authentication
- Some hotkeys like rotate screen.
- Automatic screen rotation when put in tablet mode.

So this means that the touch screen capabilities of this laptop work out of the box. Well done developers at Ubuntu / Gnome / etc !

So, how do we get the other things to work then ?

First thing i did was to get the wireless up and running. You will need to download a few things so you need another pc with internet connection and a usb stick, or if you have dualboot you can use windows to download it or you can plug in a network cable as that works fine out of the box.

What you can do is just go to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers. BUT DON’T !

This will allow you to install the standard proprietary Broadcom STA drivers and you might even be lucky with those. However if you have a system identical to mine, you won’t be. The drivers installed fine, seemed to work, i can actually see my network neighborhood and it looks like it actually tries to authenticate itself to my wireless router.

However, that is basically all it does. It just does not work properly, so I uninstalled the drivers again and went for it manually, which is usually the way i got things working on this laptop/tablet

If you want to follow this guide, please reassure yourself that you are actually having a wireless network card of the type that this guide is intended for, or something really similar : The BCM4328. You can use the lspci command for that, which lists all attached PCI cards on your PC.

$ lspci
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 03)

If there is a line in the list that is similar to the one above, you can proceed following this guide. If it’s very different, I think it is better to just google for another guide or maybe just buy some USB wireless adapter that is supported by Linux.

The first thing you ought to do is install the ndiswrapper, and a tool called cabextract :

$ sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
$ sudo apt-get install cabextract

When you completed this, it’s time to download the drivers themselves. We will be using the windows drivers for this. (hence the installation of ndiswrapper)

The best you can do is to use HP’s own driver package to make this work. You can download it here :

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqnk/us/download/24001.html

If you look at the list of what this driver is for, you won’t see the tx2000 listed there. I do not known why this is, but this is actually the driver you are looking for.

when you downloaded this, transfer it to your home folder if it is not already there and put it in a seperate folder. I will assume you took the last option as that is the easiest way to do things : put in a network cable.

$ mkdir wldrivers
$ cp SP34152.exe wldrivers
$ cd wldrivers
$ cabextract SP34152.exe

if you list that folder, you will see that the .exe is extracted and the folder now contains a few files including bcmwl5.inf, which is the one we are after.

Next thing you do is install the drivers using ndiswrapper :

$ sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
$ sudo ndiswrapper -m
$ sudo depmod -a
$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

It should be working now already. you can check that by browsing your network neighbourhood by clicking the network icon on top bar on your desktop. If you do not see your own wireless router, unplug the network cable as apparantly it will ignore the wireless SSID that you are already connected to with cable and it doesn’t need to make the same connection twice.

Next thing you want to do is make sure you have wireless available to you the next time you reboot, and that is done by putting the ndiswrapper line in /etc/modules so that at startup the module will automatically be loaded into the kernel.

$ sudo gedit /etc/modules

Just put ‘ndiswrapper’ (without the quotes ofcourse) on a new blank line at the end of the file and you are set.

If it still doesn’t work for you at this point, simply reboot and try again. If it fails after that, you will need another guide than this one as you seem to have another wireless adapter installed. (which hp unfortunatly is really good at, making the same thing in dozens of versions, all with different hardware)

For the other stuff, i still have to figure out the why and how, but as soon as I did, I will add the instructions to those in a new post.

For now, you already should have a perfectly working system including touchscreen capabilities.