Ubuntu 9.04 and HP Mini 311 with nVidia Ion LE

[kjacques]

"I'm using the glx version of the dock with GPU acceleration". Is this a different version than regular cairo dock? Can you point me to where you got it? I've been downloading the stable version from Launchpad. https://launchpad.net/~cairo-dock-team/+archive/ppa

Is the empty slot for a mobile broadband card? Here is a link to the mini 311 service manual. I think you can actually put a 2 gig ram chip in also. Can't wait for my machine to get here so I can try some of this stuff. Eta is not till the end of the month though...

Ken

[JoeMac42]

Both GLX and non-GLX flavors install with the standard installation. You can try each out by going to >Applications>System Tools. Once I confirmed that the dock worked with GPU acceleration, I stuck a pointer to it under >Sytem>Preferences>Startup Applications>Startup Programs tab>Add with

cairo-dock -o

as the code and then deleted the lower Gnome panel.

I ordered a 2GB DDR3 1066MHz Kingston SODIMM last night from Newegg. We'll see how it works out. Thanks for the link to the manual. I have a spare 3.5" 250 GB SATA that I wanted to try out, but I was having trouble seeing how the HD rails were attached.

[kjacques]

Let me know how the upgraded memory and hard drive swap goes for you.

Ken

[demonfoo]

I've installed Karmic on my Mini 311, and so far everything has worked out of the box except for WiFi. I've tried the 'wl' driver included with karmic, the slightly-newer driver downloaded from Broadcom's site, and I've also tried tracking down their Windows drivers and attempting to use them via ndisloader. Using ndisloader always manages to Oops the kernel, and using 'wl' manages to discover networks, but when I try to join them (even the neighbor's open, unencrypted wireless net), I always get:

Oct 16 14:24:01 swordfish wpa_supplicant[959]: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS
Oct 16 14:24:01 swordfish wpa_supplicant[959]: Trying to associate with 00:1b:63:23:74:1b (SSID='mars' freq=2412 MHz)
Oct 16 14:24:01 swordfish wpa_supplicant[959]: Association request to the driver failed
Oct 16 14:24:06 swordfish wpa_supplicant[959]: Authentication with 00:1b:63:23:74:1b timed out.

It will eventually reprompt me for the network passphrase for my network, or just fail out entirely for an unencrypted network. What can I do to resolve this? I'm liking the unit, but the lack of working WiFi is a real letdown.

[kjacques]

Can't be much help with your problem because I don't yet have my mini. Mine appears to be in Shanghai and is supposed to ship on Monday. Maybe Joe might have some insight.

Ken

[kamaboko]

Hello JoeMac,

I just picked up a mini 311 with the N270. How is yours running so far? Can you post a vid on Youtube with a tour of your install and how it's working?

K

[demonfoo]

It definitely *seems* to be a wpasupplicant issue; I manually associated the WiFi interface with a neighbor's access point that has no encryption, and then ran dhclient against the interface - it acquired an IP, and I'm able to get traffic across it consistently - so the problem definitely appears to be something specific to wpasupplicant, not a driver problem per se.

Edit: I think this bug is what's responsible for my problem. I'm attempting to find a way to fix the symbol versions so that I can build the wl driver against the backport module headers.

Edit 2: This does seem to have helped, I've been able to attach to a WiFi network, at least some of the time. Unfortunately I had to do a fair amount of screwing around to make it so that the symbol versions were fixed up to that I could load the wl.ko driver against the lib80211 module from the 'linux-backports-modules-2.6.31-14-generic' package; why is there not a -dev or headers package based on this for this very reason, since it does replace lib80211.ko?

Edit 3: Okay, yes, it's completely fixed; I forgot to add its MAC to the allow list on my access point. Duh.

[mocha]

I'm considering purchasing this netbook for its Nvidia ION VDPAU capabilities. Can someone that owns it try testing HD media playback with mplayer or xine with VDPAU compiled in? You should have almost no CPU consumption. There are some PPAs out there with pre-compiled VDPAU mplayer. Also, what versions of the nvidia binary driver are you guys using, the Karmic repo version? Thanks.

[demonfoo]

I'm considering purchasing this netbook for its Nvidia ION VDPAU capabilities. Can someone that owns it try testing HD media playback with mplayer or xine with VDPAU compiled in? You should have almost no CPU consumption. There are some PPAs out there with pre-compiled VDPAU mplayer. Also, what versions of the nvidia binary driver are you guys using, the Karmic repo version? Thanks.

Yes, VDPAU works fine on mine with Karmic; however, there's an additional repo you need to add for VDPAU-enabled xine-lib (mplayer is in mainline karmic, I believe). The CPU usage when playing 720p trailers downloaded from Apple's trailer site is ~18% in Xine, and ~25% in mplayer, with no dropped frames. I'm using the 185 package version supplied with karmic, which so far seems to work perfectly (including HDMI out; haven't tried VGA out yet, but I'm guessing it's the same story). The repo I mentioned is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

[demonfoo]

Also, on an unrelated note - I've figured out a way to update the BIOS on the Mini 311 (successfully updated mine from the F.02 release build it shipped with to the F.04 release build on the HP web site).

This involved:

• Using Wine and a tool called UniExtract to extract the files from the InstallShield installer image provided on the HP site (then extracting the one *inside* that, which actually contains the updater and the Flash ROM image)
• Finding the BIOS update tool for the Acer Aspire One netbook (same BIOS vendor, and contains a DOS tool called FLASHIT.EXE that works for this vendor's BIOS)
• Assembling a floppy image containing FreeDOS to be loaded with MEMDISK, using HIMEM.SYS + TDSK.EXE (a RAM disk tool which doesn't require EMM386.EXE)
• Booting the faux disk with MEMDISK via PXE (FreeDOS got confused when I tried to load it from GRUB on a USB flash disk; it kept hanging up trying to grok it as a hard disk)

If anyone's terribly interested, I can explain the process in more detail.

Edit: After doing a bit of research, I've discovered why I wasn't able to boot the image via MEMDISK direct from GRUB2; seems that "linux16" and "initrd16" directives are what I was missing, so I should be able to just update the BIOS direct from GRUB in the future. Even better. Saves the need to PXE boot the silly thing.

Edit 2: I've written a Perl script to use 7zip, unzip, mtools, wine, wget, and a tool called isxunpack to generate a FreeDOS boot floppy for updating the Mini 311's BIOS. Tested in QEMU, so far seems to work as expected (of course not doing the actual ROM flash, but everything up to that point).