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HP tx1000z and Fedora

Overview

I bought an HP Pavilion tx1219us laptop in July of 2007. This was a fixed configuration they sell in stores and is from their tx1000z series. It had all the features I wanted and there were at least a few reports on google that Fedora installed on it OK (with problems). The following documents my trials at install Fedora 7.  This is out of date now but I'm keeping it around for those interested.  This laptop is also a somewhat decent Hackintosh computer.  Works great with Mac OS X except for non-accelerated video (no DVD playback) and no audio recording; although that may change some day if drivers are developed.  The issues from 2007 with Linux are mostly around for 2009 with Mac OS X so similar work arounds apply.

The bottom line is that if your willing to download and install the latest versions of all software then this laptop works pretty good with Linux. Once bleeding edge software starts making it into Linux distributions then it should be pain free using this laptop.

You may also be interested in other people's install reports. Links to other HP laptop reports can be found at Tux Mobil.

  • Wireless Broadcom 4328 802.11 a/b/g/n-draft - WORKS
  • Ethernet - WORKS
  • LCD 1280x800 60Hz - WORKS (TODO - Rotating)
  • Touchscreen - WORKS
  • Mouse Touchpad - WORKS
  • USB Port - WORKS (tried a USB mass storage drive)
  • Lightscribe DL DVD/CD-Rom Burner - WORKS (only tried reading)
  • Modem - UNKNOWN
  • Sound - WORKS
  • Monitor Keys (DVD button, rotate, etc) - PARTIAL WORKING (some seen as keypresses)
  • Function Key Alternates (sleep, dimmer, etc) - PARTIAL WORKING (some seen as keypresses)
  • Volume/Mute buttons - WORKS (seen as keypresses)
  • Frequency Scaling - WORKS (tried Ondemand)
  • Power Savings - PARITAL WORKING
  • Web Camera - WORKS
  • Finger Print Reader - UNKNOWN
  • Memory Card Reader - UNKNOWN

CPU Info

The 800 MHz speed is because of frequency scaling. 

 cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 104
model name      : AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-58
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 800.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge 
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext 
fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy 
svm extapic cr8legacy 3dnowprefetch ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps
bogomips        : 1596.76
clflush size    : 64

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 104
model name      : AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-58
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 800.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge 
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext 
fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy 
svm extapic cr8legacy 3dnowprefetch ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps
bogomips        : 1596.76
clflush size    : 64

Fixes for common boot problems

I originally downloaded Fedora 7 LiveCD with the intent of using it to run gparted to shrink the partition with Vista on it by half. When I booted from the disk, Fedora locked up very early in the boot process. This lockup seems to occur a lot.

Lockup #1 work around

My first lockup occured right after Fedora printed the following messages: 

 Uncopmressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
PCI: BIOS BUG #81[00000000] found

It hung for a long time and so I reached for the power button to reboot. Instead of turning the computer off, I notice it had another effect. The computer became unhung and continued booting!

Remember this part... Its going to be used during most reboots. It seems to be going into some sort of sleep mode and is also ACPI related because booting with acpi=off causes it not to lock up.

I later discovered that if I remove the power cable then it constantly goes into this sleep mode. I have to hit the power button about every other second to make it come out of sleep mode.

UPDATE 2007/08/15: I have installed Fedora 8 Test 1 on this laptop. Initially, the laptop stick locks up and requires tapping the power switch. But after a "yum update" it now no longer requires this. The next problem still somewhat exists. 

UPDATE 2009/09/12: What ever is source of this issue, Mac OS X has same issues and same work around.

Lockup #2 work around.

Hitting the power button right after loading the kernel allowed the system to continue for a while but it eventually locked up while loading X. I used google to find a couple of work arounds. I don't quite understand why both ways work. They both involve adding an option to the kernel boot options. To add options to the LiveCD, hit the [tab] key when grub is loaded.

  • Option B - Add "noapic". Lockup #1 still occurs.
  • Option A - Add "vga=0x317". Lockup #1 will still occurs but the screen is totally blacked out when it occurs. It appears like a worse crash but hitting power button still resumes.

These same work arounds will be needed when using the Fedora 7 Install DVD or most other current Linux CD/DVD's.

UPDATE 2007/8/27: The above problem appears to be fixed with latest kernel updates in Fedora 8 Test 1. I still boot with vga=0x317 because I prefer its looks. Don't know if thats masking any more problems.

Preparing Vista for Dual Boot

I recommend highly downloading the gparted LiveCD. You'll probably save yourself some headaches that I describe below. Also, the Linux kernel it uses didn't seem to lockup like Fedora 7 was.

I booted up Fedora 7 LiveCD and ran gparted from Applications->System Tools->Gparted. I noticed an [!] by my Vista's partition. So I right-clicked on the Vista partition (/dev/sda1) and select Information. It gave me a warning message about Invalid Clusters. It suggested running "chkdsk /f" under Vista and rebooting **twice**.

Speed tip: The reboot twice is important. Also, I went ahead and ran Disk Defrag under Vista first to also help clear the problem up.

Vista tip: Vista is much more strict on permissions. If you simply run cmd.exe and run chkdsk you don't have permissions to do that. Instead, type "cmd" in the search box of the Start window; but do not hit enter. It will show you that it found cmd.exe. Right click on cmd.exe and select "Run as Admin". Then you can run chkdsk correctly.

Once the Vista partition is clean, you can use gparted to resize the partition. After doing this, I rebooted Vista so that chkdsk could be ran.

Turns out Vista will not boot anymore. Hopefully, if you downloaded the latest version of gparted this will not happen to you. But this seems to be a common problem by searching with google. If you press F8 and select Safe mode boot, you'll notice that it hangs right after loading the driver crcdrive.sys. Seems most of Windows recovery tools can't even handle this filesystem with errors and will also lock up.

If it does happen to you, the following solution worked for me. Load either Fedora 7 LiveCD or Gparted LiveCD. Bring up a terminal and run the following command: 

 /usr/bin/ntfsfix /dev/sda1

Now you should be able to reboot Vista and chkdsk will run can correct any remaining problems.

Installing Fedora 7

Using Fedora 7 boot DVD, I couldn't boot. It hung at with a message "ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs". Using either work around from above seemed to work fine.

During the install and even more so after installing Fedora 7, the X video was very hard to read. I could barely see enough to log in to GDM. I resolved this simple enough. I made sure I had an internet connection, changed to a console (ctrl-alt-f1), logged in as root, and ran "yum -y update". I rebooted after that completed and all looked much better.

If possible find a copy of Fedora 7 with updates already applied to DVD and you'll save some time. I've had good luck with Fedora Unity project but they don't seem to be supporting Fedora 7 right now.

Unfortunetly, even with updates, lockups still occur that require the above work arounds.

Wireless

Found a driver for *XP* on the ndiswrapper's web site for the Broadcom wireless card. I had best luck with sp34152.exe. Probably any recent broadcom driver that is referred to as bcmwl5 will work (uses bcmwl5.inf as install file). The drivers that Vista uses (sp34488.exe), which use bcmwl6.inf, didn't seem to work. When I used those drivers, /var/log/messages prints out a bunch of messages about unknown symbols.

The following are some brief steps to extract files from drivers and install them. 

 yum install cabextract
 mkdir /tmp/bcm
 cd /tmp/bcm
 cabextract /tmp/sp34488.exe
 /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatch was not enabled in Servies... So I enabled them both and started them both using System->Admin->Services. That gave me an icon on status bar that I could click on and select an Access Point. Things worked as normal from there.

Touchpad

By default, the synaptics touchpad configuration programs weren't installed. So I used yum to do this. Once installed, you can turn the sensitivity down some to stop th e mouse of jumping around so much. You can also disable any thing like tapping or scrolling features. 

 yum install gsynaptics

You can't use these programs though until you edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. You need to add the SHMConfig option to your Synaptics section. Here is my portion of that file. 

 
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Synaptics"
        Driver      "synaptics"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
        Option      "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

Touchscreen

I originally tried to get the touchscreen working with the EVTouch X Window driver because there were reports of using it with eGalax USB Touchscreens. I had no luck in getting it working.

After much research, the reason appears to be because this laptop has a HID Device compliant touchscreen and Fedora is auto-loading a HID Device (hiddev) driver for it.

The EVTouch driver appears to work only with the usbtouchscreen device driver; which also supports eGalax USB Touchscreens. I found no way to force Fedora to not load the hiddev driver since its compiled statically into the Fedora Linux kernel.

I found that eGalax makes a closed source X Window driver themselves and it does work with hiddev's. It can be downloaded from their Linux Driver page.

There are some guides on using the driver inside the archive file. After installing egalax_drv.so into /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input, I then edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I added the following to the file. 

 Section "InputDevice"
           Identifier     "EETI"
           Driver         "egalax"
           Option         "Device" "usbauto"
           Option         "Parameters" "/etc/egalax.cal"
           Option         "ScreenNo" "0"
 EndSection

I also Added a 

        InputDevice    "EETI" "SendCoreEvents"

to the ServerLayout section. There was no need to compile or install the USBSrc directory.

When I first used the touchscreen, the X coordinates were right (left and right worked) but the Y coordinates were inverted (drawing up caused mouse to go down). I ran the TouchKit program that came with the package and using the Calibration option. After following its directions then the touchscreen worked perfectly.

Shortcut Keys

You can use GNOME's System->Perferences->Personal->Keyboard Shortcuts to make alot of the shortcut keys work. I got the following keys working right away because they appear as key presses.

  • Rewind, Play, Fast Forward, Stop buttons on lower right portion of screen.
  • Volume Up, Down, and Mute on upper left corner of keyboard.
  • Web Browser (fn-F3)

I couldn't get the following keys to register as key presses. TODO: See if they register as ACPI events and for those using a deamon of sorts. More then likely, they are showing up as scancodes but they don't may to keys that X understands. This would require using xbindkeys program to get working.

  • Help (fn-F1)
  • fn-F4
  • Sleep (fn-F5) - It works but puts computer into sleep before saved to disk.
  • fn-F6
  • Screen Rotate (lower right of screen)
  • Setup (lower right of screen)

The following result it unknown scancodes. You can look at the output of dmesg to see that they are unknown. A message is printed each time you press them. To get these working will require using the ''setkeycodes' and xbindkeys program. I'm putting this off for know.

  • Multimedia (lower right of screen)
  • DVD Start (lower right of screen)

The following worked without any setup.

  • Screen dim Up/Down (fn-F7 and fn-F8)
  • Mousepad Toggle (above mousepad)
  • Wireless Toggle (disables wlan transmitting but unknown if it powers down its hardware. NetworkManager still thinks it should be working and attempts to reconnect to a network)

Sound

Sound was not automatically working for me, although the sound device was correctly detected and snd-hda-intel driver loaded.

Turns out that the driver is getting confused. There is some things you can do to get the speakers working but the mic and headphones will have issues with drivers shipped with Fedora 7. A future update should resolve this.

To get sound working, edit the file /etc/modprobe.conf. Make sure hte snd-hda-intel line has model=3stack. 

 options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack

This gives the driver enough hints to think there are 3 outputs (1 for speaker and 2 headphones). This gets the speakers working anyways.

I see an email thread on alsa-devel that is attempting to get this working automatically. I'll see what help I can provide as well. Once a real fix is ready, you'll not want to but the model line as it might do more harm then good.

UPDATE 9/2/2007: I have been able to get all audio working by using the latest ALSA drivers. Well, I haven't tested the mic yet but I'm guessing its working since so much of the other parts are working. Hopefully, they will make an official release soon and the drivers should find their way into your favorite Linux distribution.

You can grab the most recent version from |their driver snapshot web site. Then do the following sequence: 

 bzip2 -dc alsa-driver-hg*.tar.gz | tar xvof - 
 cd alsa-driver-hg*
 ./configure
 make
 sudo make install

Then you'll need to reboot since you probably already have the drivers loaded. IMPORTANT: You'll want to change your modprobe options back to default values if you changed them. Else you'll only get a subset of possible features. 

 options snd-hda-intel index=0

Also with new drivers, the "mute" LED is no longer orange but the more normal blue. For some reason, it stays blue even when the audio is muted. Seems like the driver has some control over it so maybe this can be enhanced.

X Windows Issues

Sometimes I would boot up and the cursor would be invisible. Some googling turned up one possible solution. That would be to modify xorg.conf and turn OFF HWCursor.

Another solution seems to be to boot with vga=0x317 and noapic at the same time. Not sure why it fixes it but seems to work for me.

CPU Scaling

After I upgraded to Fedora 8 Test 1, I noticed CPU Scaling was automatically working. I'm fuzzy if I enabled it myself because in past version usually I have to enable the "cpuspeed" service first. This is under System->Administration->Services. Just make sure "cpuspeed" has a check mark beside it and that the service is started.

Web Camera

I have done only limited testing of the Web Camera but it appears to work. I tested it with the Ekiga (VoIP) client that comes with Fedora. You need to download a driver from the Linux UVC Driver web site. 

 svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
 cd trunk
 make
 make install
 modprobe uvcvideo

When using Ekiga or similar programs, be sure and select V4L2 interfaces instead of just V4L.

Power Savings

I believe that the cpufreq service is enabled by default on Fedora 8. With this service enabled, CPU frequency scaling was automatic and defaulted to Ondemand which is best for saving power and reducing heat.

With the very latest kernels from Fedora 8 Test 3, I was also finally able to get Hibernate mode working. This saves its current state to the hard drive and then when you reboot it resumes fully booted. Its roughly twice as fast bootup time. There are a few side issues let such as resuming the network connection correctly.

I was not able to get suspend to work. This save the current state to memory and powers everything else down but the memory. It should be must faster to resume from this mode. During the resume, the monitor stayed black. This is a pretty common problem and there are several suggested work-arounds on the internet for this. I'm holding off on a kernel upgrade to "just work" since that seems to be happening with all the other problems I had each week.

Finger Print Reader

I have not had time to try this out and its a very low priority feature for me.

The Libfprint Project looks promising though. It contains a lot of drivers for various finger printer readers. And it also has a pam module to integrate with GDM to auto-login.

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