This blog turned 10 years old on March 5th, 2012. It started life as a humble blosxom script and stayed like that for two years when I migrated to a self-hosted wordpress blog. Since I’ve been tracking late in 2007, there has been 180,000 page views — a good percentage is probably spammers.

Here are my move viewed blog entries:

1. messing around with tiles (13-Aug-2004; 16,153 hits) — a silly little post about using the taprats java app to generate some interesting titles. It is also where I got the favicon for nozell.com.
2. family pictures — including one of me naked! (4-May-2003; 7,560 hits) — Seems lots of people are searching for naked photos on the internet. Who knew? The entry has some bitrot, but I had scanned some old photos as part of a genealogy project. Here is the photo of me butt naked.
   
3. Getting started with the SheevaPlug (12-May-2009; 7,158 hits) — finally a geek-related entry! I’m still somewhat happy with LordShiva.local, but it sometimes flakes out losing the root filesystem. Its backup function has been moved to a DreamPlug.
4. flickr upload for gnome’s nautilus (4-Sep-2004; 6,077 hits) — Back in the Debian/Sarge days I wrote a little Nautilus script to upload flickr photos. It got some link-love from flickr. Sadly the script is lost to the ages.
5. I’ve seen things, I’ve seen them with my eyes… (5-Mar-2004; 4,901 hits) — damn earworm by the excellent Weebl. Surprisingly the link is still good. Best part of the song? Kuala Lumpur!
6. Some tips to (re)install grub on an HP ProLiant server (8-May-2004, 4762 hits) — Back in the day HP ProLiant with SmartArray controllers, Red Hat and grub didn’t love each other as much as they do today. My notes were popular for a while, less so over time.
7. Logitech USB headset & Ubuntu/Linux (13-Sep-2006; 4,263 hits) — evidence that random devices work out of the box on Linux just like it usually does on Windows.
8. hp 2133 update (4-Jun-2008; 3,799 hits) — described some problems installing various distros of Linux on my cute little hp2133 netbook. Since then Ubuntu has been running on the hp2133 just fine and has ubeen upgraded through Oneric. Now it is off at college with Son #2 who uses it for notetaking in class.
9. SheevaPlug customizing pre-installed Ubuntu/Jaunty (17-May-2009; 3,392 hits) — misc notes on the SheevaPlug when it was running Ubuntu/Jaunty. Currently it is running Debian/Squeeze mainly because Ubuntu dropped support for the ARM CPU it uses.
10. SheevaPlug is now my main home server (26-Jun-2009; 2,916 hits) — A write up on what the SheevaPlug was hosting in my home datacenter. All those functions have moved to the newer and more capable DreamPlug.

The other big milestone is I’ve had the nozell.com domain for 15 years — 6-Feb-1997. I have children that are younger than that domain!


Record last updated on 07-Feb-2012.
Record expires on 07-Feb-2013.
Record created on 06-Feb-1997.


So the end of last week I plugged it into my network switch and upgraded to Oneiric Ocelot. I was pleasantly surprised that the wifi now works and didn’t require any fiddling around with random drivers or configs. Nicely done Ubuntu Team!

Here is the bug report: BCM4311 wifi hangs hp2133 notebook after 2 minutes

Some suggestions from IRC are to try the bcmwl-kernel-source or linux-backports-modules-net-natty-generic packages.

Addy: Is this thing on? , originally uploaded by marcn.

“Rules” can be stifling if taken to extremes. Break the rules today with focus, composition, etc, and see what happens.

#ds116

The only pain was of course getting the wireless card to work. That simply meant getting the Broadcom firmware into /lib/firmware/b43

The instructutions on http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 were right on. You will need to build b43-fwcutter from source pulled from the git repo, but the commands are provided.

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!