Hewlett Packard TX1250ea and Linux

* Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) relieves most of these problems. There is still the need for NDIS. *

The Hewlett Packard TX1250EA is a bit of hassle to set up for Linux. So far its all up and running with the exception of the fingerprint scanner, which is recognised but I don’t know of any Linux software that supports biometrics.

At the menu, select F6 and add the following lines to the kernel:

noapic acpi_irq_balance irqfixup irqdebug pci=biosirq pci=nomsi acpi_osi="!Linux" acpi_os_name="Windows 2006" noirqdebug

I kept a copy of Windows Vista, so used Vista’s partitioner to reduce the first partition. I made two partitions - swap and root.

After rebooting, the first hurdle as always is wireless.

I used the ethernet connection without any problems and downloaded ndiswrapper and these Windows XP Broadcom drivers. I didn’t need to blacklist the bcm43xx module, it wasn’t loaded.

Unzip the drivers:

unzip -a R151517.EXE

Then load the ndiswrapper module:

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.infsudo ndiswrapper -l

This will not automagically load at boot time, so you need to do:

sudo -s echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules exit

Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack position_fix=0 single_cmd=0

I had to reboot here, reloading ALSA didn’t cut it. I also had to play around with the sound settings to get the sound unmuted. It's also worth mentioning here that the latest version of ALSA used in Fedora Core 8 seems to support the soundcard off the cuff and supports the volume control mute button colour changing.

Webcam works with Ekiga, as long as you select V4L2.

First, you need to download the driver from the manufacturer. Then copy the driver to the right location:

sudo cp egalax_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/.

Lastly, insert the following into your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "EETI"
        Driver          "egalax"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/usb/hiddev0"
        Option          "Parameters"    "/etc/egalax.cal"
        Option          "ScreenNo"      "0"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"
        Inputdevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        Inputdevice     "Configured Mouse"
        Inputdevice     "Synaptics Touchpad"
        InputDevice     "EETI"          "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection''

When you restart the X server, then run the TouchKit utility from the downloaded driver tarball to calibrate.

Lastly, you need to blacklist a few things or it wont work on reboot. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

blacklist usbtouchscreen blacklist tkusb