Mandriva 2007.1 on HP TX1120 tablet
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to install 2007.1 on a HP TX1120 laptop (a tablet). This is a really slick laptop; it’s an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (1.8GHz), with 2GB RAM, a Seagate 160GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 (ok, the graphics card leaves a little to be desired as it’s a 64MB card that can use shared memory (up to 512MB I think)), DVD DL writer, synaptics touchpad, a Broadcom (“Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI) 802.11b/g card, NVIDIA nForce gigabit ethernet, Realtek High Def audio card, and the touchscreen itself (an eGalaxy thing). Came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium.
First: Vista is awful! Ick!
Second: Mandriva 2007.1 installs and runs really nice on this, with a few caveats. I used the 32bit version (tried the 64bit one as well, it seems to work no worse than the 32bit although the throughput from the wireless card seems lower), and the wireless card works with ndiswrapper. Sound doesn’t work (yet, I’ve done some reading and it seems like this card isn’t really liked). The bcm43xx driver does not work (no choice but to use ndiswrapper). The graphics display was properly detected and configured. Putting the thing to sleep (hibernation, suspend? no idea what to call it, I pushed a button by accident and it went to sleep and wouldn’t properly resume).
The touchscreen doesn’t seem to work at all. Not sure if I’m missing something, but MCC doesn’t seem to offer anything to configure it, there’s nothing special noted in the xorg.conf file, and the reading I’ve done that pointed to a callibration tool and a driver have done nothing for me yet.
All in all, it’s a really nice laptop. Might have to get myself one of these; my Toshiba Libretto is being under-used because my fingers are too fat to work on the keyboard properly. But this guy is pretty small (smaller than my macbook), although the glossy back makes fingerprints really stick out and the screen itself is really amusing to look at after my daughter does some writing on it (in Vista, unfortunately). Haven’t tried the SD card reader yet to see if that works, but as it stands now, it’s very very usable (although sound and the tablet itself working would be a really nice bonus.
AdamW
You could try booting kernel-tmb for the sound (and also bcm43xx, it may well work with kernel-tmb). Just because kernel-tmb is 2.6.20 and has ALSA 1.0.14 so it has lots of upstream fixes for sound and bcm43xx. The SD card reader should work if it’s a TI or SDHCI-compliant model, me and Thierry added support for all the SD card readers we could find info on.
touchscreens I don’t have a clue about sorry
Apr 27, 2007 @ 00:37:25Vincent Danen
Ok, the bcm43xx looks like it works with the tmb kernel, but it doesn’t (loads, no errors, but never manages to get an IP address). Sound doesn’t work with the tmb kernel either.
I did test the SD reader, and it works fine with either kernel, so that’s good at least.
Haven’t gone further with the touchscreen yet; I figure I’ll go back to the stock Mandriva kernel for now since there seems to be one less thing working with the tmb kernel (wireless), and ndiswrapper doesn’t work with the tmb kernel (I suppose I’d need a newer ndiswrapper user-space install for that to work).
Apr 27, 2007 @ 10:33:35John
There’s a bug about the tmb kernel and ndiswrapper that sounds like your problem:
http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=30129
I had the exact same problem on my Dell Inspiron 8500 (using ndiswrapper, but I now can’t remember the wifi model). I know that others had success, but I had no end of problems getting it to work reliably over several kernel versions. Fortunately (!), that laptop died a couple of weeks ago and I replaced it with one that has an Intel wifi card.
Best of luck to you…
May 01, 2007 @ 05:38:59Vincent Danen
The ndiswrapper problem wouldn’t be much of an issue if the bcm43xx driver worked. I’d also be more interested in the tmb kernel if it did fix what’s broken with the “stock” kernel, namely sound, but sound doesn’t work on either kernel, so I’m sticking to the Mandriva-supplied one (overall it works better due to it working with ndiswrapper, and even if the tmb kernel did work in this regard, there still isn’t a compelling reason to use it).
May 02, 2007 @ 14:20:56raindog
Thinkpad X41 tablet here, and I haven’t had any luck getting the touchscreen (Wacom-compatible with a serial interface) working under 2007.1 either.
The Mandriva guys on their club forums just tell people to install the linuxwacom package and follow its FAQ, but that FAQ seems to assume that either you know what serial port the touchscreen uses or it’s USB, and neither applies to me. It worked fine under Ubuntu 6.06 but was “/dev/ttyS4″ and Mandriva only goes up to ttyS3.
I can’t get sound either (Intel chipset) but it does get recognized, appears to be playing sound, and just doesn’t produce any audio no matter what the mixer’s set to. Again, Ubuntu 6.06 worked fine. I’d probably have stuck with Ubuntu if it weren’t for the whole “KDE users are second class citizens” thing. Yes, there’s Kubuntu, but Kubuntu is like buying a British car with a conversion kit that lets you drive from the left seat, but the steering wheel is still on the right.
So overall, I’m pretty frustrated with 2007.1. I wish they’d spend a little less development time on making my windows look like they’re made of jelly and a little more time on autodetecting hardware correctly.
May 20, 2007 @ 13:12:47Vincent Danen
=)
Yeah, it would be nice if the hardware detection worked better (isn’t that always true tho?).
However, for kicks I just tried Ubuntu 7.04 LTS and it’s even worse. Can’t even get it to boot on the system. For one, it hangs if you don’t have an ethernet cable plugged into the laptop and when you do that, it then hangs on “Setting up console font and keymap”.
So, on this machine, Ubuntu is a whole lot worse than Mandriva.
May 20, 2007 @ 15:16:07Vincent Danen
Well, just tried OpenSUSE 10.2 on here and it’s no better. During install the sound light was blue (connected), but post-install it’s off (orange), so no sound there. It did go through and install everything tho.
No wireless network support here either. And no tablet support.
I should know better than to try anything other than Mandriva. =)
May 20, 2007 @ 16:39:57ehio
About the sound in Mdv 2007.1 and HP tx 1120. I got the speakers working on a tx 1140 by using the following procedure.
First I downloaded the source RPM for dkms-alsa-driver-1.0.14-0.rc4.1pclos2007.src.rpm from http://rpm.pbone.net/
I compiled it using rpm –rebuild as root
finally I installed using rpm -Uvh
/usr/src/rpm/RPMS/i586/dkms-alsa-driver-1.0.14-0.rc4.1mdv2007.1.i586.rpm
Then added the following entry into /etc/modprobe.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-digout
That got the sound working from the speaker but i cannot get the headphones to work. All sound comes out from the speaker..
Jun 03, 2007 @ 13:56:34Vincent Danen
Hmmm… tried that, and the sound didn’t come up. So I tried changing some of the stuff in modprobe.conf as well (essentially just doing “install snd-hda-intel; /bin/true”), and now the laptop sucks CPU like there’s no tomorrow, making even logging in on runlevel 3 a 10 minute chore.
Apparently that’s not a good thing to do. =)
Yippee! Ok, after some more fiddling (or basically un-mucking what I had mucked), my modprobe.conf looks completely like this:
alias eth0 forcedeth
install scsi_hostadapter /sbin/modprobe sata_nv; /bin/true
remove snd-hda-intel /sbin/modprobe -r snd-pcm-oss; /sbin/modprobe –first-time -r –ignore-remove snd-hda-intel
install snd-hda-intel /sbin/modprobe –first-time –ignore-install snd-hda-intel && { /sbin/modprobe snd-pcm-oss; /bin/true; }
install usb-interface /sbin/modprobe ohci-hcd; /sbin/modprobe ehci-hcd; /bin/true
alias wlan0 ndiswrapper
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-digout
And now I have sound! The little mute light is still orange (instead of blue), and the volume control in gnome still has an “x” on it, but dang it, I can use “play” to play a wav and ogg file just fine. Nice!
Thanks *so* much for the tip!
Jun 09, 2007 @ 00:43:52Vincent Danen
Aaarg! Doesn’t want to persist across reboots. At least when I log into KDE, the sound settings for the important stuff are muted again, and in the volume control program the “switches” pain has headphone enabled. No idea why since I keep turning it off.
Also looks like the control that matters is the Volume control for the “Realtek ALC861-VD (OSS Mixer)” that counts. Farting with the “HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer)” device does nothing.
Well, I’m more there than I was before. Just need to figure out how to make that volume control stick.
Jun 09, 2007 @ 00:57:43PaulG
Like several of you, I am running a couple of laptops, mostly on Ubuntu (7.04/6.10), and openSuse 10.2.
I really wanted a tablet for a new job I just started, and the new HP tx1120us was too beautiful to pass-up. I love it, even though I must use Vista for now if I want to use all of its benefits.
But, like you guys, I started on the first night trying to find out how far “we” can go with Linux!! I have done the Mandriva, Suse, Red Hat/Fedora, Knoppix, Gentoo and a few others loads….to no avail.
I know there are groups of hack code that can be strung together to get some functionality out of this beauty, but for now, I am afraid at work, I will use Vista until Linux catches up. I feel like such a traitor!! I still use ONLY Linux on the other machines, but……
Jun 15, 2007 @ 16:20:59Vincent Danen
Yeah, I hear ya. Although, to be fair, the *only* thing that isn’t working is the touchscreen/tablet functionality. And the fingerprint reader, although to be honest I haven’t tried to make that work since that’s fairly minor.
I’d love to have the tablet functionality work. That would be ideal. But I’ve got everything else working properly.. sound, wireless, you name it.
Except for some reason the touchpad scroll bar (that little strip on the right) scrolls the mouse up and down, but doesn’t act like a scroll wheel. I’m almost positive that it worked before, so I’m not sure what happened. I’ll have to look into that again I think.
Jun 17, 2007 @ 14:03:42PaulG
So, Vincent, did you have the same experiences w/your tx1120–that most Linux’ didn’t even finish booting, and most that finished, froze?
Really, there were only one or two that even tried hard! Mandriva and openSuse were the only two, for me.
If I follow your lead (above) it will probably only work w/Mandriva, right? I agree w/you: I can live with a fancy laptop, as long as I can play music and get to the WiFi (yours works, I think). Oh, did you get the XGL or 3-D up yet? I think I have that one….
PG
Jun 17, 2007 @ 16:47:59Vincent Danen
The only other one besides openSUSE and Mandriva that I tried was Ubuntu and it fell flat on it’s face. Didn’t try very hard at all.
Yup, everything works except for the tablet functionality, which all things considered, is one major reason for a tablet, but it still works like any good laptop should.
And no, I haven’t tried any of the 3D stuff; that’s less important to me than wireless and sound. =)
Jun 19, 2007 @ 08:56:18Ehi O
Using the 1.0.14 alsa driver. I got the orange mute light to turn blue using the option model=lenovo
Okay apart from the light sound is still as it it. I opened an alsa bug report, hopefully it will be fixed.
I have a version of evtouch that works fine with the touchscreen, it is based on the evtouch from debian with an additional patch from me to make it work with the tx1000 series laptop. I could send you the tar file by e-mail to build it or even a binary driver already.
Jul 08, 2007 @ 13:25:20Vinay
Were you able to get the webcam and mic also working?
Jul 15, 2007 @ 08:07:09Vincent Danen
Hmmm… to be honest, I haven’t tried. The mic is largely useless to me… can’t imagine ever using it. The webcam might be interesting but… well… I try to avoid anything other than IRC if possible… =)
I’ll give it a try one of these days and report back.
Jul 17, 2007 @ 15:01:51Ehi O
Here’s the patch to evtouch-0.8.6
– xserver-xorg-input-evtouch.orig/evtouch.h 2007-05-25 13:40:22.000000000 +0200
+++ xserver-xorg-input-evtouch/evtouch.h 2007-07-29 05:54:43.000000000 +0200
@@ -74,6 +74,6 @@
* Absolute axes
*/
-#define ABS_X 0×00
-#define ABS_Y 0×01
+#define ABS_X 0×02
+#define ABS_Y 0×03
#define ABS_WHEEL 0×08
——————————–
/etc/udev/rules.d/99-evtouch.rules
SYSFS{idVendor}==”0eef”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0001″, KERNEL==”event*”,SYMLINK+=”input/touchscreen”
———————————–
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “touchscreen”
Driver “evtouch”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/touchscreen”
Option “DeviceName” “touchscreen”
Option “MinX” “43″
Option “MinY” “3959″
Option “MaxX” “3983″
Option “MaxY” “140″
Option “SwapY” “1″
#Option “SwapXY” “1″
Option “ReportingMode” “Raw”
Option “Emulate3Buttons”
Option “Emulate3Timeout” “50″
Option “SendCoreEvents”
EndSection
———————————
Don’t forget to modify the ServerLayout section and add the line
InputDevice “touchscreen” “SendCoreEvents”
———————————
/etc/modprobe.conf
options usbtouchscreen swap_xy=1
———————————–
Jul 28, 2007 @ 22:24:33Ehi O
The webcam works with kopete as a USB 2.0 Camera and in ekiga it is a v4l2 device.
Jul 28, 2007 @ 22:33:27For me both mics work fine with latest verion of alsa driver 1.0.14 (tested with skype) but the headphone jacks do not work.
Vincent Danen
I can see the camera work in kopete and ekiga, which is nice. Looks much better in ekiga than kopete tho. Tried the sound test and stuff in ekiga and it wasn’t working, so I don’t think the microphone is working properly (yet).
Aug 04, 2007 @ 12:11:05Vincent Danen
Yaaaa! Ok, had to change 99-evtouch.rules slightly to add the KERNEL bit first, then the rest. udev was complaining otherwise (might have been the lack of a space before the SYMLINK bit tho, not sure). Anyways, it works!
The only issues I’m seeing now is there’s a bit of a delay, i.e. you need to hold the pen down instead of a quick tap to make it move. Also need to figure out how to emulate a right click.
And then find an on-screen keyboard and it will actually be usable as a full tablet.
This entry is getting quite full of comments… I should really take all of this and put it on my wiki as a tutorial or something…
Thanks for those tips tho! They work great, although I think I need to figure out how to tweak things a little better.
Aug 04, 2007 @ 12:15:13Vincent Danen
Oh. This might be really simple but the little “scroll wheel” on the touchpad (the separate strip to the side that in windows allows for scrolling up and down) doesn’t seem to work (I think it did before, but I can’t remember). Scrolling that with my finger just moves the mouse pointer up and down (synaptics touchpad). I’ve got the following in xorg.conf:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “SynapticsMouse1″
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
Option “TouchpadOff” “2″
EndSection
…
InputDevice “SynapticsMouse1″ “AlwaysCore”
Any ideas?
Aug 04, 2007 @ 12:19:18ehio
Mandriva 2008.0 beta 1
Aug 17, 2007 @ 23:31:13Has anyone tried to boot Mandriva 2008 on the tx laptop.
I found that on my tx1140 series, the kernel just hangs until I press the power button again (a soft lock up??)
Paul
Same here. Actually I have tried about 40 distros on the TX 1122 and several hang, requiring me to ‘push’ the power button. The biggest problem seems to be the sound. I can get the wifi going and might as well give up for now on the tablet functions (w/out a lot of tweaking). The front earphone works w/some distros. Sabayon works well, as does a few others, but Mandriva was the most promising–until I tried 2008….maybe they will fix the ‘power’ issue….lol
Aug 18, 2007 @ 12:39:26Ehi O
Option “TapTimer” “0″
Option “LongtouchTimer” “160″
Option “LongTapTimer” “160″
Adding the above 3 lines to the touchscreen device section in xorg.conf makes the pen work quite fine. To right click just use the good old tap-n-half technique: 2 quick taps but keep the pen pressed down on the second tap.
Aug 26, 2007 @ 09:09:16On screen keyboard is xvkbd
Also adding RandRRotation to the nvidia device section allows you to rotate the screen.
Ehi O
Try to remove the entry
Option “TouchpadOff” “2″
It might help
Aug 26, 2007 @ 09:11:50Ehi O
Just got word that the audio fix is now in the ALSA HG tree.
Aug 26, 2007 @ 09:14:08I’ve not tried yet though..
PaulG
I have just loaded 2008.0 on my TX1120…..outstanding. I also tried the 2008.1 beta….even better, The only things not working out of the box are the tablet function and the web-cam (I think)…..
Mar 23, 2008 @ 23:33:17vdanen
I haven’t tried 2008.1 on the tablet yet (haven’t had time to try it on something I use for “real” work, but I did try it on my toshiba libretto). I do plan on loading 2008.1 on there within a few weeks of release.
Glad to hear there’s no real regression. I did get the tablet to work at one point with 2008… I think doing an update of something borked it somehow tho… doesn’t work anymore. The webcam I did get to work in ekiga tho, but I didn’t spend too much time on it since I don’t really IM, VoIP, or video-chat with anyone.
Mar 24, 2008 @ 09:59:01