HP 2133 Report

[Phil Meyer]

I bought an HP 2133 for my daughters graduation from massage therapy school.

It was about $460.00 from Newegg.
It was the 512MB/4GBssd/SUSE version.

However ...

She took it out of the box and fired it up at dinner, and it wouldn't boot!
So, of course, dear old dad volunteered to take it home and 'fix' it.

It turns out that it was not what I ordered.  It had 1GB RAM and a 120GB 
hard drive, so I decided not to complain to newegg/HP about the bad 
install of SUSE.  It looked to me like SUSE was about 50% missing and 
corrupt.  LOTS of files from various rpms were simply missing.

I, of course, put Fedora 9 on it for her.

The b43 wireless worked perfectly after adding the firmware.
All other devices, video camera, etc, were detected and worked normally, 
except for the video.

Fedora tried to use the openchrome video driver, but that was not 
functional.  It defaulted to 1920x1200 resolution, which is hard to work 
with on a 1280x768 display. :)
And if the mouse was moved, it locked the machine hard.

I switched the driver to vesa and dropped in a xorg.conf slightly 
modified from the SUSE installed one to force the video mode to 
1280x768.  The vesa driver is not optimal for anyone or anything, but it 
works.

I could not find a value for the kernel parameter vga= that would allow 
alternate consoles to work.  It is unclear if that is a problem with the 
vesa driver.

Digging around on the openchrome site indicates new support for the 
video in the 2133, but it has not yet made it into the driver released 
into the Fedora testing stream.  Hopefully, it won't be too much longer.

IMPRESSIONS

It was hard to give it back to her.  That thing is useful!
The aluminium case does get warm on the bottom.
She is able to carry it around in her purse.
The display was great.
The keyboard was great.
The track-pad was awkward due to size and placement so close to the 
keys, but very functional.

Overall, recommended, especially if the openchrome driver gets updated.