7. hpaq: HP 2000 2b53CA

After the death of t43, an IBM Thinkpad T43, I acquired this notebook computer.

In the store, it was $399 raw price, with $60 discount.

I started the install at about 9:30pm, had to twiddle a bit to get BIOS into legacy mode so I could do the install; it was avidly UEFI, initially. Apparently it comes with Windows 8, 64 bit, as the default, which won't work unless it's tightly integrated into UEFI, so that there's the full chain of vendor controls over video and sound. They wouldn't want anyone to be able to use Windows 8 to "pirate" movies; priority #1!.

Got it to the point of thinking about loading packages across the network at about 10:30-11. It then spent into the wee hours loading Debian Squeeze packages (some 1300 of them).

In the morning, I rebooted, threw in a couple packages to start bootstrapping configuration (I want git, zsh, cfengine for such), and got it to the point of having *some* of what I want on it.

Wireless wasn't up yet, needs a blob that looks like it's in Debian, likely some of firmware-linux-nonfree, firmware-ralink, firmware-realtek. TBD.

It then ran an "apt-upgrade" from 6.0.5 (what I had a net install disk handy for) to "testing", which, operating on 1300-ish packages, takes a good portion of time. Next steps were:

• Upgrading to a 3.2 kernel

• Installing the nonfree firmware package, and turning on wireless

• A bit more DHCP cleanup, including setting up other things on network to know about host "hpaq"

• Pull a modern emacs onto it

• Set up Aurora/Firefox (I downloaded it; didn't have enough libraries yet last night to be able to run it)

• apt-get install etckeeper

It has 4GB of memory, expandable to 8GB, which cost ~$60. It was very slightly tricky figuring out how to get at the memory slot; it hides behind the panel immediately "below" the battery. Removing the panel required:

• Unscrewing the one screw visible in the battery compartment, along the "top" of the panel. Note that the screw will not come all the way out; it stays attached to the panel.

• Once the screw has been loosened, fingernail pressure will pull the panel off; it is held in by small tabs.

• There are two memory slots; only the inner one was occupied.

• No change to BIOS or the like was needed to recognize the 8GB of RAM; it was automatically recognized upon reboot.

The one thing I'm noticing as a hardware-ish irritation is that the touchpad is more sensitive than I'd like. Just a matter of taste.

• HP 2000-2b53CA Notebook PC (C2M48UA) - specifications and warranty

• HP 2000-2B53CA, Bilingual Laptop, IntelŪ PentiumŪ B980 @ Costco.ca

• Crucial.com on HP 2000-2b53CA memory upgrade

  • Memory Type: DDR3 PC3-12800, DDR3 PC3-10600, DDR3 (non-ECC)

  • Maximum Memory: 8GB

  • Slots: 2

• A trouble I faced when trying to upgrade from Linux 2.6.32 to 3.2 or 3.8 was that the latter kernels would lead to the screen heading to black shortly after boot time, and the screen thereafter declining to show anything. The machine was running and otherwise functioning, as I was able to log in remotely.

  Web searches looking for similar troubles suggested ACPI configuration troubles that could be addressed by modifying /etc/default/grub, assortedly:

  • Indicate nomodeset

    Which seemed to have no effect, hence I removed it.

  • Indicate acpi_osi=Linux

    Which seemed to have no effect.

  • Indicate acpi_backlight=vendor

    Which did have the desired effect, in conjunction with the previous.

  This seems to relate to control over screen brightness; apparently if ACPI is not "told" to do/ignore this, upon loading Linux, the screen will get shut off.

  Debugging Backlight on the Ubuntu wiki appears to best describe what is going on.

  Once the backlight configuration is set as described (with acpi parms passed to Grub), brightness configuration can be found in /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight; the following are interesting settings:

  • cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness

    Gets me 4882, the maximum permissible brightness

  • echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

    Setting brightness to 0 turns out rather unhappily

  • echo 4882 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

    Setting brightness to 4882 is the starting default

  • echo 50 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

    Setting brightness to 50 leaves the screen quite dim. The lowest value that seems reasonably readable is around 10.

    root@hpaq:~# lspci -v | grep -10 01:00.0 | tail -11
    01:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. Device 539b
            Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 18ed
            Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
            Memory at c2500000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
            Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
            Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/32 Maskable- 64bit+
            Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
            Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
            Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 00-00-7b-66-63-31-17-a4
            Kernel driver in use: rt2800pci

    oot@hpaq:~# rfkill list 1
    1: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
            Soft blocked: no
            Hard blocked: yes
    root@hpaq:~# rfkill unblock 1 
    root@hpaq:~# rfkill list 1
    1: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
            Soft blocked: no
            Hard blocked: yes