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Linux on HP 6530b

First I would not advice anyone to buy this computer. It's a pain to make it work on Linux, the screen is small, colors are terrible e.g. a gray too blue, a blue and a green so close that there is no way of telling them appart when the difference is obvious on other screens. I also have nice rubber marks on the screen thanks to well designed buffers.

Trouble with this computer

Using Ubuntu 8.10, the installation is ok but there are still many things to do.

Wifi

It seems there is no way to activated the Wifi under Linux. You have to activate it under Windows (so do that before removing it). When it is activated (i.e. the led is blue), then you can come back under Linux and everything is fine.

Brightness

Hotkeys Fn+F9 and Fn+F10 should allow to change the brightness but nothing happens by default. Here is a trick found on Ubuntu forums:

Under my hp6530b I created this file

/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/30-keymap-private.fdi

its content is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>

    <match key="@input.originating_device:info.linux.driver" string="atkbd">
      <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.hardware.vendor" prefix="Hewlett-Packard">
        <match key="/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer:system.hardware.product" contains="6530b">
          <!-- HP Compaq 6530b -->
          <append key="input.keymap.data" type="strlist">e012:brightnessdown</append>
          <append key="input.keymap.data" type="strlist">e017:brightnessup</append>
        </match>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Restarted and now I have the icon working when pressing brightness hotkeys, but brightness still not works.

Then in a shell tried to:

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native

And brightness with hotkeys is working.

Sound

After installation the sound is ok as long you use headphones but speakers remain silent. To hear them make a file /etc/modprobe.d/sound with

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop enable=1 index=0

Suspend (Fn-F3)

When I resume after suspend, sometime the fan run at 100%. A solution is to plug and unplug (or unplug and plug) power wire.

HP is not fair

I described reasons why I do not appreciate this computer on HP web site as a testimony, but they didn't published my comment. No surprise there is only one five stars comment!

Trouble with Ubuntu

I didn't use Gnome for a while so I decided to try it to see if it improved. So far it's ok so I figure the missing features have been add and bugs removed since... few years.

Keyrings

For some reason, someone figured funny to pop up a window each time I use ssh, even when my ssh-agent is on. I didn't found any wait to stop it nicely so now I kill it :

/usr/bin/killall gnome-keyring-daemon

Flash without sound

For a unknown reason I had no sound in Firefox with Flash. I added

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

in /etc/apt/sources.list and installed the package adobe-flashplugin. Now it's ok.