We walked in support of Governor John Lynch’s re-election but also said hello to US Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter and hopefully our future US Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

I don’t know who thought of it first, but Trevor got his cast signed and Logan his t-shirt signed by all three of them (and NH 1st lady Dr. Susan Lynch)

After the parade we had a picnic with some friends down at Wasserman Park which was nearly empty. The weather held out and it was a great day.

Here are the rest of the photos: July 4th parade, Merrimack, NH

First blueberry!, originally uploaded by marcn.

The NH Flickr Group is planning as photo meetup every Saturday this summer at 5am at some picturesque location.

Last week was at Merrimack’s Horse Hill Nature Preserve and this week was at Amhert’s Ponemah Bog.

Keep an eye on this discussion group for information on future ones — NH Flickr Discussion Group

Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama Laughing, originally uploaded by marcn.

Carol Shea-Porter

Paul Hodes

Jeanne Shaheen

NH Governor John Lynch & Dr. Susan Lynch

Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Unite for Change

All the photos from the event are here: marcn’s buddy icon
Obama/Clinton @ Unity, NH

Press Release HP Contributes Source Code to Open Source Community to Advance Adoption of Linux and the AdvFS site on SourceForge.

RIBS!, originally uploaded by marcn.

Yummy ribs. But I wasn’t brave enough to try deep fried sparklers(!)

BTW, next time you are in downtown Nashua, stop by Martha’s Exchange and have a Cherry beer with the Jambalaya — spicy but delicious!

Smilin’ John McCain, originally uploaded by marcn.

I took a late lunch yesterday and saw John McCain at Nashua’s Daniel Webster College.

As you can see he does have a natural smile — compare that to the horrid ‘lime green speech’ he gave last week.

I’d guess there were about a thousand people there, mostly older with a few people in their 20s-30s. The crowd only applauded once during McCain’s speech before the Q&As, and that was after a ’stay in Iraq until the job is done’ line. Dead quiet while talking about immigration, social security, etc.

The rest of my photos are here:
John McCain @ Daniel Webster College

First up — installing Ubuntu/Hardy. On the boot prompt, you’ll have to add xforcevesa or the video will flake out. Using an external USB CD/DVD drve, the standard Ubuntu CD boots and starts the install, but after resizing the SLED10 partition down to 10G, the install fails with the following message:

Next up — Fedora 9. Again using an external CD, the install starts up well, but then soon fails when trying to locate the CD containing the install RPMs. I has been a while since I’ve used Red Hat on the desktop, so I’ll give Fedora another try later. (And it will make the Red Hat folks at GNHLUG happy ;-)

Next up — Ubuntu/Hardy Alternative Install CD. This version uses the tried-and-true debian install process and this time it works great!

With the stock Ubuntu/Hardy it finds and configures the wired network, graphics, audio (except the earphone jack), MMC disk. The Broadcom Wifi does not however and needs to use the ndiswrapper with firmware downloaded from the hp.com support site.

The post-install steps for Ubuntu/Hardy to get the WiFi working can be found on “WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty No-Fluff”.

For the hp 2133, the steps are:

1. I found on my Ubuntu/Hardy that the bcm43xx module was already on the blacklist so the first line wasn’t necessary. See line 32 of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. You’ll still need to install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 and create a tmp directory to unpack the wireless firmware.

   
# NOT NEEDED echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

   sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
mkdir ~/bcm43xx; cd ~/bcm43xx


2. Since my hp 2133 has a Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 02), use Step 2a which downloads from Hewlett-Packard the Windows firmware for the Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 02)

   
sudo apt-get install cabextract
wget ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe
cabextract sp34152.exe


3. Step 3 is to install the firmware using ndiswrapper. My /etc/network/interfaces file already had an entry to the ‘lo’ device, so didn’t need to do that. Also ran into problems trying to load the modules on boot, so I don’t load ndiswrapper from /etc/modules. Also I didn’t bother to edit /etc/default/wpasupplicant because on my home wireless network. I don’t use authentication — wireless access is locked down by MAC address at the wireless router.

   
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

   #NOT NEEDED sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.orig
   #NOT NEEDED echo -e 'auto lo\niface lo inet loopback\n' | sudo tee /etc/network/interfaces

   sudo ndiswrapper -m

   #NOT NEEDED by me echo 'ndiswrapper' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
#NOT NEEDED by me echo 'ENABLED=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/default/wpasupplicant


4. As the wiki page mentions, there is a bug in Ubuntu/Hardy related to the ndiswrapper and ssb loadable modules, so after every boot, I do the following steps which I put in a little script, enable-wifi

   
#!/bin/bash
# This is ~/bin/enable-wifi
ndiswrapper -l
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo rmmod ssb
sudo rmmod ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo modprobe ssb


   After a few seconds the NetworkManager applet will start looking for wifi networks and automatically connect.

   I’ve tried following the wiki’s instructions on making it permanent, but found that there were nasty kernel messages about the ssb loadable module dying and preventing ndiswrapper from loading.

The next post install step is to fix the audio driver. The sound card works okay, but doesn’t turn off the speakers when a headphone is plugged in. The other great wiki page, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133 has the solution. Essentially download and install alsa-driver-1.0.16_linux-headers-2.6.24-17-generic-1_i386.deb.

Why hasn’t a fix been pushed into the repositories is unclear.


sudo mv /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver \
/lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic.ubuntu.sound.alsa-driver.bak
sudo ln -s /lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/kernel/sound/ \
/lib/modules/2.6.24-17-generic/ubuntu/sound/alsa-driver


Although it may look like a lot of work, it wasn’t that difficult. If you have problems, check back to the source wiki pages.

Here are the obligatory unboxing photos.

Man it is tiny, but after a few hours of getting use to it, it isn’t *too* small for typing. I’m getting to like the button under the space bar that disables the touchpad for when you are doing extended typing.

See the rest of the photos here:
HP 2133 mininote unboxing

I’ll be blogging more about this nice hardware as I explore it — hw specs, restore CDs, installing Ubuntu/Hardy and Fedora 9, and any little hints along the way.

Full Disclosure: While I do work for HP, it is not in any PC/notebook related area, although I do use Linux (RHEL4, OEL) on ProLiant servers on a daily basis. Also this a personal purchase for home use. I didn’t even get an employee discount!

We walk by a Men’s restroom and Trevor, being a smartass, hits the handicap button that opens the heavy door.

It opens — and Governor John Lynch is washing his hands! Walking down the hall we get to talking and when he noticed my camera. He had an aid take a group photo in the Governor’s Reception room.

I love this little state!