Monday, February 21, 2011

HP Mini 210–1076NR + Ubuntu Netbook 10.10

I had a hell of a time getting the broadband working.  This particular devices comes with
Gobi 2000 and I had to do a lot of silly playing around to get it up and running.  It is odd
that the live CD out of the box supports it, but the final installed version didn't.

If you plan doing an install, I would try to be somewhere you can get a Ethernet cable to
plugin so you can get all these updates and get things squared away.

1. if it's not installed already, (apt-get install gobi-loader) get the firmware from the windows partition.
There should be a folder named Qualcomm in your standard Program Files folder.  Which contains the various firmware.  This document explains which folder to get:.  You need to grab the content of the appropriate folder
and copy it to /lib/firmware/gobi

reboot and everything worked fine for me.  If that fails, you may have to load it manually.
    gobi_loader /dev/ttyUSB0 /lib/firmware/gobi

fyi.  If you have the wrong firmware (at least in my case) it just hanged there indefinitely, while when I had the right firmware it worked almost instantly.

Wireless didn't work for me out of the box, but that's the typical broadcomm being "special" thing.  If you do the usual updates it started working for me again due to penguin magic from the ubuntu repos.   I'm sure there's about 800 sources of how to get this working, so I won't go into it.  If you have trouble.. post a comment, and I'll update the article.

2 comments:

  1. How did you get the wireless to work on the HP Mini?????

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  2. Depends what you mean by wireless. Wifi? or the 3g/4g broadband that comes with the netbook. Wireless wasn't that difficult though it's been a while. the broadband drive was a royal pain. Eventually I did get both wifi and broadband working, though It was far more painful then I would have liked. (I'm not sure what the status is on the current Ubuntu version)

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