Submitted by j.a.watson on April 2, 2009 - 6:54am
I haven't had much to say here recently, because everything has been humming along very nicely. I am still extremely satisfied with my HP Mini-Note running MEPIS 8.0; anyone who is considering a netbook could do a lot worse than this combination, that's for certain. In fact, I have recently looked at the "successor" to this model from HP, the Mini 2140. The case is nearly identical, but the screen has been expaned to 10". That would be good news, except the RESOLUTION is only 1024x576! HP is actually very cagy about this, if you go to their web page and look at the specs, it doesn't even say what the resolution is (for good reason, if you ask me...), you have to go to the PDF detailed spec sheet to find the resolution. There is says that there are two, 1024x576 and 1366x768, but as far as I can tell there are none of the higher resolution models available yet. Since writing about mine on here, I have bought a second one, for my partner; when I bought it, I didn't realize that it was a lower resolution than mine, 1024x600 instead of my 1280x768. That turned out not to be a disaster, because although the lower resolution makes for even less display and more scrolling, the display itself is actually brighter and easier to read. But I can't for the life of me imagine why HP would put an even lower resolution on the NEXT generation of the product... I could get one of them here in Switzerland now, for about the price that I paid for mine originally, but I just don't want to deal with that display. Maybe if and when the higher resolution display is available.
Anyway, the reason I am writing now is CPU Frequency Scaling. I recently realized that my Mini-Note wasn't adjusting the CPU frequency, it was running full-speed all the time. That made for a rather hot system, and the cooling fan was running constantly - and of course it was shortening battery life. I found a note in the Ubuntu Wiki that said the 2133 required a special parameter on the kernel boot line, acpi_osi="!Windows 2006". Hmmm. Ubuntu is based on Debian. MEPIS is based on Debian... I didn't just come down with the last rain... so I gave it a try.
First, verify that the CPU frequency is not being changed. Easy enough, add the System Guard applet to the task bar, and then if you don't want to go blind staring at it, right-click and Launch System Guard. Ditch one of the default graphs, and add CPU0/Clock Frequency in its place. Sure enough, it is a constant 1.6 GHz.
Now edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, and on the kernel... line, add the new parameter:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 acpi_osi="!Windows 2006" nomce quiet splash vga=791
Reboot, and that should do the trick! Verify again with System Guard, you should see that the CPU spends most of its time at 800 MHz, moving up to 1 GHz or 1.6 GHz when needed. The cooling fan is running low or not at all most of the time. Good stuff!
One other thing. In the MEPIS System Assistant, under Laptop Power, there is a check box for "Dynamic CPU speed on AC". This has no effect, as far as I can tell. Without the new parameter on the kernel command line, the CPU speed never changes, and with the new parameter it always changes, regardless of whether on AC power or not and regardless of the setting of this check box. No big deal, of course.
As I have said before, the price on these 2133 Mini-Notes keeps going down, especially now that the 2140 is becoming available. If you want a good netbook that works well with MEPIS, look at it.
No, I do not work for HP or their distributors, and I am not on commission.
jw
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