present tense

I’ve been installing SUSE Linux on my HP TC4400 tablet computer. This page describes what features of the machine I’ve been successful in accessing with Linux and which ones are still a problem. Other pages will describe more interesting tablet software.

Basic InstallationThe only issue with installing Linux on the TC4400 is that it doesn’t come equipped with a CD or DVD reader. I got around this by putting the operating system DVD images on a network mountable drive, booting the TC4400 from a flash drive with a mini version of Linux and running the install from there. This is all described pretty well in the Installation without CD instructions but for one small glitch.

When you boot from a flash disk, the laptop assigns the flash disk the moniker of hd0 and calls your actual hard drive hd1. All of the new information about how to boot Linux is written to hd0 and as a result the laptop won’t boot without the flash drive installed. The instructions mention this as a possibility and give very simple instructions for dealing with the problem which unfortunately didn’t work for me. I had to learn a bit about GRUB before could boot without my flash drive plugged in.

Following just the standard install script, SUSE Linux 10.2 gives you an excellent laptop operating system with a clean desktop interface (I selected KDE).

Screen
The screen was sharp and beautiful. It’s configured to its maximum resolution of 1024×768 and 24 bit color.

Networking
Both the wired and wireless network connections worked. However, the wireless networking can fail, depending on the setting of a BIOS parameter. Ensure that the “Embedded WLAN Device Radio” (under the “System Configuration/Built-In Device Options” is Enabled.

Basic Pointing Devices
Both the track pad and the track button worked as did my wireless usb mouse.

Power Management

Power management and related functions are flaky.

Suspend to RAM does not work. Each time it is invoked the system prepares to suspend and then, just as it ought to turn off, it announces that it is resuming and goes back to the OS (and reestablished a network connection).

Suspend to Disk works correctly some of the time, once in awhile. But more often it hangs up just before it should turn the machine off.

Power Management is also unreliable. Sometimes it works fine but often the ACPI interface doesn’t send updates for the battery or the power cord. When that happens it doesn’t notice when you plug or unplug the AC power and it doesn’t track the battery usage (or notify you when the screen is about to go blank). I still don’t know what triggers the correct functioning.

Tablet Features
The tablet pen did not work automatically, but it only took some simple configuration work to get it started. The details of that, plus additional changes to support screen rotation, can be found here.

Misc Features
The audio hardware worked fine however, the built in player Amarok did not seem to recognize mp3 files.^*

Firefox 2.0 worked fine except for the Quicktime movie plugin.^* And, of course, OpenOffice and many more applications were pre-installed and ready to go.

SD Memory Slot Until it arrived, I didn’t even know the laptop had a slot for an SD memory card initially. Unfortunately, neither did Linux. However, it was not difficult to install a driver for it.

^{*An acceptable plugin for Quicktime movies and an mp3 plugin for Amarok, as well as Flash, Adobe Acrobat Reader and Java 1.5 can be easily installed by following the instructions here: http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7527984757.html and replacing 10.2 for 10.1 where appropriate.}