Installing on HP Mini 1000

[gotrevgo]

Hi all,

Sorry if this has been covered but I wasn't able to find anything helpful. Has anyone successfully installed Ubuntu on the new HP Mini 1000? It ships with XP now and will come with a custom version of Ubuntu in the new year but I can't wait to get it.

I'm using it almost exclusively for writing so my needs are relatively limited but I'd be interested to know if I should expect any problems installing or overall compatibility issues.

Thanks!

[gotrevgo]

I'll definitely post a more thorough explanation but I installed 8.10 using an external CD and everything just worked. I upgraded the wireless drivers but right after installation everything appeared to be completely supported.

- Audio from internal speaker
- Video in proper resolution
- Wireless
- Keyboard layout
- Function keys (brightness, volume, hibernate)

Suspend:
I set it to suspend when closing the lid and prompt with the reboot / suspend dialog when I press the power button. Pressing the button worked and displayed the dialog but closing the lid only turned the display off. I think that's part of the firmware, I'm not sure. Later I set the power button to suspend the machine, which it also did without issue. This seems to cause the machine to suspend when the lid is closed, though it's not that reliable. It seems to work about 50% of the time. This is the only problem I've really run into, hopefully something can be done to make it sleep every time I close the lid, as I have drained the battery a few times already.

Battery:
This might be flaky, it runs on battery without issue but I'm not sure how reliable the guage is.

I'm working on a more detailed blog post and will link to it here. If anyone would like me to test something in particular just let me know. Ultimately it went perfectly for someone who has decades of experience with the Mac but no knowledge of Linux.

[powderific]

Thanks for the info, how do you like the Mini 1000 so far? Right now I'm debating between it, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, and the Acer Aspire One. I do have a couple questions, if you don't mind:

What's your battery life like?
Does the wireless work ok with WPA secured networks?
Does it reliably suspend if you just press the power button? Not suspending properly would be a huge deal breaker for me, but I wouldn't mind just pressing the button.

Incidentally, I'm also planning on using whatever I get primarily for writing, so, how has it worked for you thus far?

edit: also, how's the trackpad? Does scrolling and whatnot work well?

[bwmcadams]

What's your battery life like?
Does the wireless work ok with WPA secured networks?
Does it reliably suspend if you just press the power button? Not suspending properly would be a huge deal breaker for me, but I wouldn't mind just pressing the button.

Incidentally, I'm also planning on using whatever I get primarily for writing, so, how has it worked for you thus far?

edit: also, how's the trackpad? Does scrolling and whatnot work well?

I got my Mini last Tuesday and it works fantastically with Ubuntu. I installed via USB stick, it has been flawless. Just stay away from Kubuntu - it was a freaking mess and I reOSed and will just have to stick with Gnome for now.

The wireless works great with WPA - I have a WPA2 network at home. The wireless driver does seem a bit ... flakey. Mostly just that they don't get nearly as good reception as they should, but nothing major. Seems to be a result of the proprietary broadcom drivers ubuntu installs. Hoping to find a good answer to this.

When I push the power button (it's actually a switch that you slide) Ubuntu presents me with a menu asking if I'd like to suspend, hibernate, restart, log out or cancel. Works great, and suspend / resume has always been reliable.

I don't have a good answer on battery life, but the keyboard size is fantastic - something like 90% size versus a real keyboard, and I have fairly large hands which seem perfectly happy touch typing (with an occasional fat fingering of the wrong key).

The mouse works fine - both tap-clicking and scrolling work out of the box on Ubuntu with no tweaking.

[powderific]

Thanks for the great info, bwmcadams!

Bummer about kubuntu being messed up. KDE has been my favorite WM since I first started using linux. Oh well, it isn't a huge deal, especially when the HP seems like such a great notebook in general.

[bwmcadams]

To be fair, based on what I've seen and read it's more an issue of KDE 4.x being really unstable than any slight against the Kubuntu team.

To clarify, the "deal breaks" I ran into with Kubuntu:

- Graphics "glitching".
+ KDM on startup, anything outside of the 4:3 portion of it looked tiled and glitchy - hard to explain but you'd understand if you saw it
+ When opening the menu for the first time after logging in, or any panel in the menu, you get "tv static" where the window will be before the window draws. It happens w/ some apps as well. Brief, but annoying and demonstrates that Kubuntu is a poor choice at the moment.

- App crashing
+ Randomly, some apps would crash out X completely. A great example is the Twitter widget for the KDE desktop that shipped w/ Kubuntu. Reliably, it would load, try to grab my tweets, and crash out the desktop.

- Power management glitches
+ Under Gnome, when I flip the power switch I get a dialog asking what I want to do. I love this, and since there's a switch rather than a button I can use it as a deliberate action to get a menu. In Kubuntu/KDE, the laptop IMMEDIATELY shuts down. I dug into this and it turns out that the power button ACPI action under Ubuntu/Kubuntu hasn't been udpated for KDE 4. Essentially, it looks and says "If Gnome is running, run it's dialog. If KDE is running, run it's dialog. Otherwise, call `shutdown now`". The KDE detection is still looking for KDE 3 - that call doesn't "find" 4. I found out the right call for 4 and got that to work, but was unable to find a working call to kick up the KDE dialog box.

Overall however, the Mini is fantastic. I should note I love the build quality, and the murderous, covetous looks I get from my coworkers while I lovingly stroke it, while cackling insanely.

[powderific]

Yeah, it seems like the new kde has been causing problems for many people. Works great in virtual box on my Mac though! I quite like the improvements. That said, X crashing is not something I feel like dealing with.

Glad to hear the Mini is as nice as the review sites say. Hopefully there'll be some way to pick up MIE and any other HP specific stuff once they come out with their own ubuntu version.

[davidsiegel]

I bought the HP mini 1000 a week ago and I can't stop raving about it. Ubuntu works *flawlessly* out of the box. Even suspend and the webcam work! My friend has the Dell Mini 9 - we put them side-by-side and there is no comparison; the HP blows the Dell out of the water in terms of style, keyboard, screen size, and Ubuntu support (he still cannot get Ubuntu on the machine). Best $400 I've ever spent.

[yogipsu]

To echo the earlier comments, Ubuntu installed on the Mini (via USB stick, after some errors with usb-creator) without issue. I only have two problems, and hopefully they're easy to resolve:

(1) The internal microphone doesn't work. Even with capture maxed in the volume controls, or even with pulseaudio disabled entirely, I get nothing. Does anyone's mic work on the Mini 1000?

(2) Does the touchpad support multitouch? I'd like to enable two finger scrolling and two finger tapping, especially given the layout of the touchpad.

Thanks!

[swlaird]

I love my new Mini 1000 (XP, 60GB, 1GB, etc.) but I had a few things I had to do:
1. Could NOT install from external CD/DVD (tried every method). Had to install from USB stick made using System->Administration->Create a USB startup disk on another PC. It's faster than a cd anyway!
2. Applied the screen tweak from the Acer Aspire One community documentation:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/As...creen%20Tweaks
This allows you to move a window out of the screen to reach the buttons at the bottom.
3. Stopped the hard drive clicking using the same docs:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/As...0death%20click
Follow the links from the site above for more solutions. (NOTE: all of these "fixes" can be dangerous.)
4. Applied the video tweaks to stop the video artifacts when using Compiz:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/As...E:%20(Optional)
5. 2GB stick of Crucial RAM (Amazon - $29.99) arrives tomorrow. Looks like others have had success.
http://blog.laptopmag.com/hp-mini-10...m-and-sim-slot

Other than that, everything worked. A recent Ubuntu upgrade seems to have fixed the audio crackle on shutdown problem I was having.

Screen - 10.2 is much better than 8.9
Touch pad - Works great (now two finger gestures that I've found) but I use a laptop mouse and I can disable the touchpad whild typing.
Keyboard - Fantastic
Speed - Even though sites say it's slower than the Aspire One, I disagree!
Hard Drive - Want a 64 or 128GB SSD but gotta wait until they drop in price (alot!). Wish it was 2.5" instead of 1.8". More options!
SD Slot - worked out of the box. Aspire One would only work if you boot with the SD card in the slot.
Wireless - Worked out of the box, even on wake. (Takes awhile, though. Gotta be patient!)


--
Steve