General Hardware Specifications of nx6310:

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.15-26-386 (Ubuntu precompiled)

Basic Installation of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS:

• Ubuntu is Debian based, and Debian is great, stable, full of support and supporters, full of packages. Ubuntu is even simple to install and use.
• You can download it here or ask Ubuntu (as I did) to ship you (for free) the cd’s here. Note that this will take some time (something like 6 weeks in my case - I live in Italy)
• Installation is fairly simple. The distro is on a single CD, that acts as a live distro. Once it started, you see on the desktop the “install” button. And then, it is really simple, if you are not too much messed up with partitioning.

Setting up additional features for Ubuntu:

• The first thing to do when you have an internet connection is update the distro. You can do it graphically by clicking System→Administration→Update Manager or in a shell by typing “sudo apt-get update” and giving your password.
• Ubuntu by default gives you not very much software, and (with tools pretty simple to use, like apt-get or synaptic) only a relatively small set of packages to download. To have the “power of Debian”, you must tell (it can be done under synaptic, or manually on file /etc/apt/sources.list) to give access to universe and multiverse repositories.
• Suspend to RAM (sleep) is by default disabled on Ubuntu: I enabled it, but it doesn’t work, since it normally goes to sleep but when it’s woken up, it only shows some funny green bars (it must be a graphic card driver’s problem). Instead suspend to disk (hibernate) works (if you gave the system enough swap space - in my case it’s 500 MB and it’s OK). The suspend button (Fn + F3) works perfectly too, so you can activate it by clicking on the battery icon on the taskbar, then on “Preferences”, and, in “General” tab, choosing “hibernate” from the second menu.
• Additional features

Unresolved issues:

• CPU frequency scaling seems not to work (not really sure, I refer only to the appropriate Gnome applet that gives an error message and sticks on 1.46 Ghz)
• Battery charge indicator is not reliable (it probably gives the right value on startup, but then it nearly never updates).
• maro wrote me:

  "gnome-screensaver doesn't work properly, neither does xscreensaver
  (both keep switching the LED backlight on and off all the time when the screen is blanked).
  To switch it on/off for good I had to do the following:
  # vbetool dpms on/off
  To do it as user you can setuid with
  # chmod a+s /usr/sbin/vbetool
  And then in Fluxbox (for example) you can shortcuts in ~/.fluxbox/keys to switch the screen on and off. "

How to get wireless working:

• bcm43xx module is shipped with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, it (still?) explicitly doesn’t provide support for 4311 chipset. So we have to use ndiswrapper. But...
• The ndiswrapper package shipped with Ubuntu is quite old (version 1.8), and the card WON’T WORK WITH IT. To get it working, you’ll have to download the sources for the latest version. Then open a terminal, move into the folder where you downloaded the source’s tarball and give the following commands:
• sudo su
• your password will be asked
• tar -xf ndiswrapper-version.tar.gz
• cd ndiswrapper-version
• apt-get install build-essential
• make
• make install
• cd ..
• wget http://senzaspazi.altervista.org/linux/bcmwl5_1390.tar.gz
• tar -xf bcmwl5_1390.tar.gz
• ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
• rmmod ndiswrapper
• modprobe ndiswrapper
• at this point, it should be possible to set up the card using standard commands (ex: iwconfig wlan0 essid ESSNAME enc off; dhclient wlan0)
• I had problem with using Gnome Network Manager (System→Administration→Network), so I just created a script that removes ndiswrapper and modprobes it again, then does my iwconfig and dhclient commands.

Contact Information:

• e-mail address toobaz AT email DOT it
• Voip sip:toobaz@ekiga.net

Links:

• The files needed by ndiswrapper: http://senzaspazi.altervista.org/linux/bcmwl5_1390.tar.gz
• The Dell-supplied executable they were took from: http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R115321.EXE
• The laptop’s datasheets: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/pscmisc/vac/us/product_pdfs/nx6310.pdf
• This Ubuntu wiki’s page could have more recent updates concerning unresolved issues: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HPNX6310/Kubuntu

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