HP DM1 4027sa and Ubuntu

I was looking for a small laptop to use on the train. I came across the HP DM1 4027sa - it looked like a surpsisingly good balance of performance and size, at a very reasonable £350.

I'll start by saying the laptop's definitely worth the money. Build quality is good (but don't expect premium at this price) and with 4GB RAM and a dual-core CPU, the whole thing is very snappy and runs like a modern PC. Considering it's netbook size and netbook price. It's great, especially in comparison to other netbooks which, to be honest, feel like a step back in time when you use them. This laptop can stream video, play HD video, run virtual machines, and so on, without any disablingly-huge performance hit.

I wanted to install Ubuntu. It's all great, but two things to save you a headache:

Remove Fourth Primary Partition

This thing comes with 4 primary partitions. You will need to delete one to get Ubuntu installed. Once you get the laptop home, boot into Windows, fire up HP Recovery Manager and use the "Create Recovery Media" option. Once you've done that, use the "Delete Recovery Partition" option to remove the partition. Then you'll be able to create a new 4th primary partition for Ubuntu.

The graphics card is not supported

If you want to use ATI's proprietary fglrx driver, you're out of luck. It doesn't work with this graphics card yet. Personally, any 3D things I want to do are in Windows, so using the open source drivers doesn't affect me here. I expect this will be resolved soon.

Broadcom 4313 Wireless is slow and buggy in Ubuntu

To fix this one, you will need to connect via the Ethernet socket. Go to Additional drivers when it's connected and make sure the Broadcom driver is enabled. Once you've done that, you're not finished: Ubuntu's lying!

Run `lspci -nn` and for this 4027sa you should find the wifi adapter has the id numbers 14e4:4727.

Run the command `lspci -k -nn -d 14e4:4727` - if it tells you the kernal driver in use is anything other than "wl", you will need to blacklist the open source Broadcom drivers. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bcm43.conf :

blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist bcma 

Save and restart. Run `lspci -k -nn -d 14e4:4727` again to confirm that "wl" is now the driver in use, then you should be good to go.

Touchpad Occasionally Stops Working

I haven't figured out /why/ this is happening. I suspect that there is an area of the touchpad that I'm pressing that turns it off (and that area isn't in the 'dip' it's supposed to be in!). However if your touchpad stops working, run this:

`synclient TouchpadOff=0`