HP DM1Z Laptop running Ubuntu 10.10

I recently purchased an HP Pavilion dm1z laptop after reading how many people were thrilled with the small laptop. It's been described as a netbook-killer, and I tend to agree with that sentiment. The dm1z is light, power-efficient, quick and runs Linux well. However, there were a few tweaks I needed to put in place to get 32-bit Ubuntu 10.10 running perfectly.

This post was last updated 2011-09-07

Other members in the Linux and Ubuntu communities had already taken care of the hard bits. But I did spend a bit of time comparing information from different message boards and solutions, particularly when it came to fixing the wifi. A helpful, thorough post is available on ubuntuforums.

WIFI

Once you have the correct driver, the wifi on HP's dm1z works flawlessly. The built-in wireless enable/disable button and LED also work without any tweaking.

It has been reported that wifi works out-of-the-box with the latest Ubuntu 11.10.

However, Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 do not have native support and the stock driver from the manufacturer is buggy and spews too much to dmesg. The packages built for openSUSE work properly. At the time of writing, the working wifi driver was from openSUSE 11.3 or 11.4:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/binaries?package=rt5390sta&project=driver%3Awireless&repository=11.4-update

You'll see 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i586) packages listed. Download the openSUSE driver package - the source RPM, not the binary package: rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-1.2.src.rpm

Open your web browser's download directory and double-click the src RPM. Extract all files into a new directory named openSUSE_rt5390sta_driver

Open a terminal and sudo to root:
sudo su -
cd openSUSE_rt5390sta_driver
apt-get install xz-utils
tar Jxvf 2011_0406_RT5390_RT5392_Linux_STA_V2.5.0.3_DPO.tar.xz
cd 2011_0406_RT5390_RT5392_Linux_STA_V2.5.0.3_DPO/
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-config.patch
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-WPA-mixed.patch
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-convert-devicename-to-wlanX.patch
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-remove-potential-conflicts-with-rt2860sta.patch
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-return_nonvoid_function.patch
patch -p0 < ../rt5390sta-2.5.0.3-reduce_debug_output.patch
mv RT2860STA.dat RT5390STA.dat
make
mkdir -p /etc/Wireless/RT5390STA
cp RT5390STA.dat /etc/Wireless/RT5390STA/
cp -i os/linux/rt5390sta.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
echo rt5390sta >> /etc/modules
echo "blacklist rt2800pci" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
depmod -a

Reboot your dm1z and the wifi should come up properly on boot.

Touchpad (Clickpad)

I'm not a big fan of click pads, but it worked OK out of the box. There was no multi-touch support and I had a tendency to hit the pad with my wrist while typing. After a few tweaks and a bit of use, I'm very happy with it.

Adding multi-touch support was easy, as described here, and made me much more productive.

I mitigated the accidental wrist swipes by adding a large 'Pointer Capture' widget to the top panel. Move the cursor there and click to lock the mouse. Click again to free the mouse. You can change the size of the mouse lock widget by right clicking and changing the widget preferences. It's a pity the built-in hardware mouse lock doesn't work, but we can always hope for future support!

Poweroff Issue - Draining Battery

An issue has been discovered which causes the battery to drain by ~10% for each day the dm1z is left off. It seems HP laptops are configured by default to support wake-on-lan via the wired ethernet port. Unfortunately, this requires that the port remain powered even when the laptop is off.

The forum thread is on ubuntuforum. A fix is listed in this post by Redblade20XX:

during start up when the bios screen boots, press the escape button and you'll be in a menu with configurations such as boot order. Press the "F10" key and immediately after press the "A" key. This will enable the advance bios option and unlock more menus for configuration. Under the advance tab, there is an option for "AMD PBS Option" and under that tab there will be options that will enable certain functions on the motherboard such as bluetooth, camera, wifi, etc. Look for an option called "external lan controller" and disable it (I think this has to due with wol). After wards, press "escape" key to return to the main bios configuration menu and move to a tab called "Power". Under that menu look for an option called "Wake on PME" (also has something to do with wol) and disable it also. Afterwards, press the "F10" key to save the bios.

If your BIOS does not support the advanced settings, you can manually force the laptop to fully power off. Edit the file /etc/default/halt to contain:

HALT=halt

This will ensure that when you shutdown the laptop, it will not actually perform the faulty power down. Instead, it will halt and wait for you to power off. After Ubuntu reports the laptop is halted, hold down the power button for 4 seconds.