Running Debian on NC4000

I bought my NC4000 before checking if it will run Linux properly. Simply could not resist it. Once I bought it I made extensive use of the NC4000 HOWTO on this laptop by Bdale Garbee. Here I will go only into the stuff which he has not covered in detail or which he has solved differently and for the rest please use his HOWTO .

Hardware Caveats

The memory controller on the NC4000 is quite fussy and will fail when used with mixed memory combinations (256+512 or 256+128). These memory combinations cause intermittent hangs especially if there is a high drain from the 3.3V rail from the PCMCIA (most option 3G cards draw enough to cause that).

aivanov@whitestar:~$ lscpi
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS200/RS200M AGP Bridge [IGP 340M] (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 340M]
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533/M1535/M1543 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV/V/V+]
00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation M5457 AC'97 Modem Controller
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)
00:0b.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711M1/MC1 4-in-1 MemoryCardBus Controller (rev 20)
00:0b.1 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711M1/MC1 4-in-1 MemoryCardBus Controller (rev 20)
00:0b.2 System peripheral: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711Mx 4-in-1 MemoryCardBus Accelerator
00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 Power Management Controller [PMU]
00:12.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)
00:12.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 43)
00:12.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 04)
00:13.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet (rev 01)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M

There is also some problem with the DMA to the video card - playing videos using xv produces an unexpected amount of skips.

Thermal Problems

At least my model (NC4000/1.3GHz) suffers from the problem suffered my many IBMs and some other HPs with classic Pentium 4 or Pentium M processors. It will hang after a while running linux without CPU frequency throttling. The reason is overheating. I have tried the following solutions:

• Limit the CPU frequency to 1.0GHz - works, Does not hang.
• Use cpufreqd and agressively tune the frequency down while still using a performance governor - does not work. Hangs.
• Use the ondemand kernel frequency governor with a reasonably recent (2.6.14 and onwards) kernel - works.

All of these are enabled by default in newer Linux kernels and distributions so it should just work out of the box.

Other Caveats and Quirks

• I have not been able to make the blue LED reflect anything meaningfull with any of the suggestions on the web. Using /sbin/sysctl -w dev.ath0.ledpin=1 ; /sbin/sysctl -w dev.ath0.softled=1 does not do a thing.
• The OSS driver for the audio actually works, but headphones vs speaker selection is broken. ALSA works fine.
• The fans can be turned on by echoing 1 into the relevant /proc/acpi items. After that they will stay on until reboot at least in 2.6.18. I have not found a way to turn them off.
• There is no driver for the card reader. O2Micro? has not released specs. Some people on the web have managed to get their hands on a half-baked tarball with pre-2.6.16 drivers which does not work with newer kernels. Unfortunately, I have never had a chance to play with that.

Hibernate

Only Hibrnate to disk works. It is tolerable because the kernel load-from-disk speed is extremely good for machine in this class from those days.

Overall

It is still a viable competition for todays netbooks. In fact because of the "sane" aspect ratio of the display it is probably better ergonomically than most modern laptops. It is a pity that HP did not bother to release the extended life battery for when it was new. It would have been the killer non-centrino laptop. Actually, rereading this sentence it is clear why they did not do it. Blessed are the powers of "Idiot outside" marketing.

However, the travel pack for it is now available and priced fairly reasonably on a couple of sites (it is compatible with some of the newest business notebooks). So this rather nice pre-netbook can be refurbished and used again (provided that you use it with Linux of course).