Ubuntu 9.04 and HP Mini 311 with nVidia Ion LE

[demonfoo]

I'm thinking of purchasing a compaq 311c, in the UK the only version on offer is the 311c-1010SA which is allegedly limited to 1GB of RAM. Has anyone actually got one of these and if so can you confirm that there is a spare (SO)DIMM slot?

The HP Mini 311 (which to my understanding is the same as the Compaq version, just different branding) has 1 GB soldered onto the board, along with the SO-DIMM slot (and I've got a 2 GB SO-DIMM in mine, so it's up to a full 3 GB).

Nvidia have confirmed that the ION-le works with VDPAU

And I can tell you from direct experience that it does as well.

I'm just concerned that if the 1GB limit is real that VDPAU will choke on 1080i content from my mythtv box

It won't. The default RAM allocation with 1 GB of RAM is somewhere north of 100 MB, so 1080i/p HD decoding should work just fine.

I've got a acer aspire revo which uses the same chipset (well, a non-le ION)

ION and ION LE are *exactly* the same silicon; the only difference (literally) is a different PCI product ID in ROM, and different code in the drivers that keys on the different product ID to disable DX10 functionality. That's all.

getting audio over HDMI required some fiddling and I still get no audio when playing flash videos

I've not had any problem with going into the Sound preference panel and switching to the HDMI output method. For digital output with ALSA, I selected the ALSA driver and entered 'hdmi' as the output device, and selected "AC3/DTS pass-through S/PDIF" for "Audio codec family" (in gmplayer).

[Paerez]

Hey guys, just tossing in my experience:

I was able to install 9.10 off a USB stick. BUT I had to make the usb stick from another ubuntu machine (generate usb boot disk). Unetbootin did not work for me.

I had to boot the installer with the "noapic nolapic" options, and I had to remove the "quiet" and "splash" options.

Then, on my first boot, I had to do those options again (add noapic nolapic, remove quiet splash).

Then, I updated via ethernet. When I rebooted to the new kernel, I could use the standard boot options.

Next, I installed dkms and then nvidia's 195 beta drivers direct from their site. DKMS will keep it up to date with my kernel (thanks dell!).

Next, I opened the hardware drivers and activated the broadcom STA driver. Then I had to add "wl" to the end of /etc/modules so it would probe the wireless at boot.

Then I grabbed flash 10.1 beta from adobe's site and popped it into my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. But it seems that GPU accel is not available for linux yet.

Webcam works with "cheese" out of the box. I don't use skype so I dunno. Haven't tested various video-outs.

[JoeMac42]

I'm thinking of purchasing a compaq 311c, in the UK the only version on offer is the 311c-1010SA which is allegedly limited to 1GB of RAM. Has anyone actually got one of these and if so can you confirm that there is a spare (SO)DIMM slot?

I'm running 3GB in my mini 311 right now. There is a 1 GB SODIMM soldered to the board and an empty slot for additional RAM. I installed a 1066MHz 2GB Kingston PC3-8500 SODIMM (P/N KVR1066D3S7/2G) sourced from Newegg.com. Compiz is much happier with the additional RAM to share for graphics.

Joe

[smurfgod]

I got the one from Verizon and mine has 2 gigs of ram. I finally made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu after finding out I could use my phone(Samsung Omnia i910) as a modem without paying for the tethering feature from Verizon.

I did have some trouble with getting Wi-Fi to work but it's working know but I do need my webcam to work. Any help guys??

In my Xorg settings it says I'm using 512 megs of ram..is there a way to drop it down??Or boost it up for that matter??lol

~SMurf

[DirtDawg]

Hey guys, just tossing in my experience:

I was able to install 9.10 off a USB stick. BUT I had to make the usb stick from another ubuntu machine (generate usb boot disk). Unetbootin did not work for me.

I had to boot the installer with the "noapic nolapic" options, and I had to remove the "quiet" and "splash" options.

Then, on my first boot, I had to do those options again (add noapic nolapic, remove quiet splash).

Then, I updated via ethernet. When I rebooted to the new kernel, I could use the standard boot options.

Next, I installed dkms and then nvidia's 195 beta drivers direct from their site. DKMS will keep it up to date with my kernel (thanks dell!).

Next, I opened the hardware drivers and activated the broadcom STA driver. Then I had to add "wl" to the end of /etc/modules so it would probe the wireless at boot.

Then I grabbed flash 10.1 beta from adobe's site and popped it into my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. But it seems that GPU accel is not available for linux yet.

Webcam works with "cheese" out of the box. I don't use skype so I dunno. Haven't tested various video-outs.

Hey, thanks! I couldn't get usb to boot up. Would have not guessed Unetbootin was the problem. Wireless and driver info was spot on as well. Thanks for the helpful post.

[hubbub]

Thanks for the tip. I was getting the blinking cursor on boot, until I pressed F6 and selected noapic and nolapic. Installing okay now.

[3ktl]

Hey I had the same problem. The solution is to install Ubuntu 9.04 then upgrade to 9.10. Works perfectly on my Mini 311-1000NR. Good Luck

[airtonix]

One thing that might not be obvious to less observant owners of a hp mini 311 is that they come in at least twenty different versions. (if not more)

This in itself is not the crazy part, but rather that many problems user A reports might not affect user B (since they don't actually have the same hardware related to the problem).

The chap above me cites problems installing ubuntu 9.10 on a 1000nr.

I also had initial problems installing ubuntu 9.10 however I manipulated the boot parameters as mentioned in some of the previous posts here (add noapic and nolapic, removing quiet and splash).

Others report problems that I do not have.

Point is that not all hp mini 311 are created equal... might be a good idea for anyone providing (omg it werks) statements to also provide the model number.

for the record my hp mini 311 is a 1018tu.

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Another interesting thing to get working would be sensor readout... having that stuff in conky would be handy

[rvugts]

I have added an extra GB of RAM a few weeks ago, to bring the total to 2GB and have not had issues anymore with hibernate sometimes failing.

[CDR Services]

There is a C4 State in the bios enable\Disable....leave it off!