(X)ubuntu on a HP Mini 5103

Today, I decided to install http://xubuntu.org/ on my HP Mini 5103 to replace my classic http://www.ubuntu.com/ installation. The reason for this change is that the classic Ubuntu did not feel fast and snappy enough. Although various reports (here or here) indicate that Lubuntu is more resource friendly than Xubuntu, I decided to try Xubuntu since the HP Mini 5103 has 2GB. The installation of Xubuntu is very easy and I won’t go into details here. The following sections deal with difficulties I had while installing. Other Ubuntu variants may have the same issues.

CPU Not Scaling

After the installation, I noticed that the fan is always on and making noise. The reason for that is the CPU not scaling and always running with 1.50Ghz. To fix this, you have to add the following option to the Linux kernel: processor.ignore_ppc=1​. Edit your grub config file /etc/default/grub and make sure you have a line similar to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=​"quiet splash processor.ignore_ppc=1​". The comment from the Linux kernel for this option is: “If the frequency of your machine gets wrongly limited by BIOS, this should help”, and it can be found in drivers/acpi/processor_perflib.c. Make sure you run sudo update-grub after that. I found the hint here.

The second option you have to add if you see a high CPU load. In my case, the CPU load caused by kworker/0:0 was around 40-50%. It looks like the problem is as described here “eg. on one of such systems enabling the native PCIe PME service without loading the native PCIe hot-plug service driver causes a storm of ACPI notify requests to appear”. People from Archlinux discussed the problem here and the proposed fix seems to work. The fix is to add the following option to the Linux kernel: pcie_ports=native. Edit your grub config file /etc/default/grub and make sure you have a line similar to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=​"quiet splash processor.ignore_ppc=1 pcie_ports=native​".

If you still have this issue it might also be due to a bug in tty_buffer. This fix has been added to 2.6.39. So, update your kernel and see if the problem still exists. To update your kernel in Ubuntu you can go to to the kernel-ppa site and install a newer kernel.

BIOS Update

Updating your BIOS is a good choice if your device has some issues (e.g. CPU scaling). To update the BIOS on the HP Mini 5103, first, create a bootable USB stick with FreeDOS (unetbootin is a good application for that). Then you have to download the latest firmware. The file can be extracted with
cabextract sp52251.exe. Copy the extracted directory Rompaq to your USB stick with FreeDOS. Then boot with the stick, type c:, change to the directory Rompaq and execute eRompaq.exe. This will start the BIOS update.

Make sure to set the following options:

  • Enable fn-key-switch in the BIOS, otherwise F10 will be to lower the volume and pressing F5 will suspend your machine.
  • Disable “Wireless Button State” to get WWAN working.

WWAN with Gobi un2400

Make sure you have disabled the “Wireless Button State” in the BIOS, otherwise lsusb does not show the device with ID 03f0:241d. The information how to get it working is (here, here, here, and here).

With the following steps I was able to get WWAN running on my HP Mini 5103

  • Download driver from HP Qualcomm Mobile Broadband Drivers – Gobi2000
  • Extract the archive cabextract sp53068.exe
  • Get wine and create directory to store the extracted files mkdir -p ~/.wine/dosdevices/c\:/DRIVERS/GOBI (you may have to run notepad if .wine does not exist yet)
  • Run msiexec to extract the msi archive wine msiexec /a ~/.wine/drive_c/DRIVERS/WWANQL/Driver/GobiInstaller.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\\DRIVERS\\GOBI (if this does not work for you, you can extract the msi archive on any Windows machine)
  • Install the gobi loader sudo apt-get install gobi-loader
  • Create directory sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/gobi and copy the files to this directory: amss.mbn, apps.mbn (both in UMTS folder), and UQCN.mbn (you have to decide which version you should use. I used the one in /6 for Generic UMTS (Europe))
  • Restart your computer (or rmmod qcserial;modprobe qcserial) and you should see now the following output:
[ 2643.968620] USB Serial support registered for Qualcomm USB modem
[ 2644.068841] qcserial 1-5:1.1: Qualcomm USB modem converter detected
[ 2644.069365] usb 1-5: Qualcomm USB modem converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 2644.069521] usbcore: registered new interface driver qcserial

The modem device changes from ID 03f0:241d (QDL device) to ID 03f0:251d (modem device) right after firmware upload. The final step is to insert your SIM card (make sure you inserted it the right way, the description on the device is ambiguous) and restart network manager.

If you are having troubles with initializing the modem and it only seems to work after a restart of the NetworkManager, you probably have to fix the file /lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-qdl-device-blacklist.rules, which seems to have a typo. Make sure this file contains the right product ID 241d instead of 201d (be aware that after upgrading or configuring udev, your change will be overwritten):

# HP un2400 Gobi QDL Device
ATTRS{idVendor}=="03f0", ATTRS{idProduct}=="241d", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"

(update 17.10.2011, the latest version 11.10 corrected this issue)

WLAN with b43

Since my upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10, I decided to install the latest Linux kernel 3.1 and to run b43 instead of brcmsmac. The following site describes how to install b43:

  1. apt-get install b43-fwcutter
  2. wget http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
  3. tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
  4. sudo b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o
  5. echo "blacklist brcmsmac" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

You should see something in your logs Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PNL, Firmware-ID: FW13 ].

However, after a crash and never been able to connect to a WLAN network, I switched back to brcmsmac.

--Thomas Bocek