Thumbs-up report: Ubuntu on HP tx1000 notebook

Hey guys, I decided to go for the HP tx1000 instead of Dell or Thinkpad, though I was worried about being able to run Ubuntu on it... It turns out, getting everything up and running was a breeze, with the help of some information on the Ubuntu forums, of course.

Graphics: Nvidia GeForce Go 6150. Worked out of the box, even on live CD, didn't even have to do anything with the drivers (did have to add a couple boot options when doing live CD though).

Wireless... broadcom is said to be a pain, but I found a script that grabbed the windows driver and installed ndiswrapper automatically, and it works! A lot of people seem to dislike both the ndiswrapper and the reverse-engineered native linux broadcom driver, but if it works it works...

Webcam.. found some instructions on the Ubuntu Forums dv9000 series thread... worked with no hassle!

SD card reader-- worked without any effort. I just popped a card in to test, and no problem!

Touchscreen: n/a for this model
Fingerprint reader : don't care

Sound: this was the last thing I got working.. the physical mute button on the machine was stuck on orange ("muted") even though the mute was going on and off in the OS when I pressed it... no sound. Then, per the tx1000 thread on Ubuntu forums, I downloaded the latest snapshot of the ALSA driver, added a simple line to xorg.conf, reinstalled, rebooted, and had sound!

Touchpad disable button registered a keyboard shortcut to bring up "Ubuntu Help" any time when switching the touchpad from disabled to enabled... would have been a nuisance but I was able to get rid of the shortcut key and that was that.

I think that just about covers it.. everything is running nicely! The machine does run a little warm to the touch but hopefully that's not too big an issue.
Just thought I'd summarize my experience here in case anyone might be curious about this sort of thing in regard to either this series or other current HP consumer lappies...
Cheers!

gyuutan

 

Congrats to you (for the new machine and your good fortune with Ubuntu)! Took me forever and a damn day to figure out how to get 1920x1200 resolution with an ATI card in an old desktop. Obviously, I need to adjust my evil lifestyle, attend church services, and pray more often to the Linux gods.

 

Or buy decent hardware.

 

Which version of Ubuntu did you use? I booted from the live CD of Gutsy and got garbage on the display. I tried in safe graphics mode with the same result.
I wish I had discovered ubuntu before I bought the HP. Vista is so bad it drove me to ubuntu. Ubuntu works the way an os should: fast, simple and doesn't get it in the way.
BTW I installed 7.04 on my old IBM x31 and it works great but that machine doesn't support widescreen monitors. However, this 5 yr old laptop outperforms the HP with Vista. Boots in 30 secs, starts from sleep in 10 seconds. Vista boot is 5 mins! Start from sleep 1 min.

 

Unfortunately, this search for drivers explains some of why people don't swarm to Linux in droves.