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Hp Compaq 2230s
Review and Step by Step Guide:
A UNIX perspective!
By: Kaya Şaman
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Contents 1. External 1 2. Internal and Tech Specs 1 3. Operating system, usage and capabilities 4 3.1Install 4 3.2Configuration 5 3.3Wireless setup 5 3.4Upgrading system components 11 3.5Usage and testing 13 4. Conclusion 19
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In this document I will review the Hp Compaq 2230s notebook in terms of design and tech specs which will be totally operating system exclusive, then later on review the system coupled together with a UNIX based operating system using a hard disk install. To start with let's approach this system from outside through inside dealing with the operating system and abilities later on. 1. External: First of all the chassis is very attractive for a business grade laptop. No frills and spills with gimmi
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memory module) chip the amount of memory per area onchip is doubled. Hence, instead of the system maxing out at 4GB RAM, it actually is able to give the system double which is the reason for the 8GB in total. The machine in front of me has 2GB of memory which will be thoroughly tested later on, but standard configurations are 2GB or 3GB of memory. This should be more then enough for the average user, the only times in question when one would need such high memory is when running multiple mul
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As can be seen the picture quality is cineperfect having a resolution of 1366x768 which falls under the category of: Widescreen eXtended Graphics Array, however there is no pixelation in the image at all and is totally photorealistic. In a small office based environment, coupled to a much smaller 4:3 format Samsung LCD display and Soundcraft Spirit Folio Notepad desktop mixer again results were more then impressive with the notebook being able to handle everything I threw at it while heavi
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radio for connection to PAN (personal area network) devices such as cell phones, PDA's, wireless headsets etc. The Intel 802.11 interface has dual radios which operate at the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency ranges. This means a,b,g, and ndraft compatibility so this notebook can connect to any wireless access point (WAP), even in the United States of America as the 5GHz range is the preferred operating frequency out there while 2.4GHz is preferred in the rest of the world. Also security abilities of
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format, but however in this case I am going to restrict myself to simply ext3. The system comes with a 160GB HD, which is more then enough for what I am going to use it for with a single OS based install seeing as I always work from network server. Out of this 160GB I will allocate 30GB to my root / partition, 3GB to my swap partition, and the rest to my user /home partition, this will be done by having the root on a primary partition and the rest on an extended or logical based partition. T
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Running ifconfig a revealed all the 'supported' interfaces on this system. And further running iwconfig revealed which interface the kernel detected with wireless extensions. The outputs below both show the system as being configured, however as this doesn't matter as without being configured they still come up in a similar fashion obviously without any wireless ESSID or IP address attached. root@Compaq2230s:~# ifconfig a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:25:b3:5a:58:f5 U
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Bit Rate=48 Mb/s TxPower=15 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B Encryption key:********** Security mode:open Power Management:off Link Quality=77/100 Signal level:56 dBm Noise level=87 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 vboxnet0 no wireless extensions. pan0 no wireless extensions. Table2. Netwo
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48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Extra:tsf=00000bdb71ab6181 Extra: Last beacon: 188ms ago Cell 03 Address: 00:1A:A1:05:D6:C0 ESSID:"" Mode:Master Channel:9 Frequency:2.452 GHz (Channel 9) Quality=67/100 Signal level:61 dBm Noise level=88 dBm Encryption key:on IE: Unknown: 0005436
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IE: Unknown: 32041224606C IE: WPA Version 1 Group Cipher : CCMP Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: DD07000A5E01010006 Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s 12 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
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nameserver 192.168.1.100 nameserver 192.168.1.101 Table6. Resolv.conf file entries. The domain and search criteria are optional and only useful if running authoritative DNS servers in a network. Since I am running primary and secondary, master and slave DNS servers I have both domain and search listed with dual name server addresses pointing to both of them on my local network. If in a SOHO setup, the DNS servers for the ISP maybe the preferred choice of entry here. Testing we can use nsloo
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;; Query time: 33 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.100#53(192.168.1.100) ;; WHEN: Mon Aug 10 18:32:20 2009 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 196 Table7. DNS query examples. Having replies in the answer sections means that DNS information is functioning properly. If not however then these tools can be used to perform diagnostics on the system. 3.4 Upgrading system components: Now that the network connectivity is up and fully functional we need to start upgrading the system components like packages and kernel in
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Unfortunately, when booted into KDE4 now nothing has changed. KDM and KDE4 are still in 1024x768 resolution with Xorg being in 1280x800. The K desktop environment for some reason has always seemed to not use Xorg like the other desktop environments such as Gnome. For this reason I am not sure if this is a KDE bug or if the DE can't interface with the GFX driver properly because the GM45 chipset is not supported and defaulting back to the old i915 derivative as shown by running dmesg. There ar
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This brings us to the second step to try, which is installing the Gnome desktop environment. This can be achieved by running: aptget install ubuntudesktop. This installs a group of packages negating the need to install every Gnome component individually. Once installed and the graphical user interface customized to my liking the system now looks like so: SCR2. Gnome2 desktop environment. As can be seen, resolution and screen size is correct, which now leads us on to using the system and th
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#mkdir codecs #cd codecs Table11. Steps to creating the codecs directory. Once done there I will copy the source location from the all20071007.tar.bz2 range, right clicking on my mouse and then selecting: copy link location Now I can use the wget internet grabber tool to pull the compressed codecs directory directly into the codecs folder and uncompress the codecs directory at the same time. There is a slight quirk with this though as the codecs are already in a folder called all20071007 m
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As can be seen from the lmsensors based Gkrellm2 temperature readouts the system doesn't even hit 50˚C of which my older machines at this point would be up at between 8090˚C with full processor utilization. The 2230s definitely makes light work of this with hardly any CPU utilization per core and in tests was able to communicate at 1.5MB/s which is 1.5 x 8 = 12Mb/s – again highly impressive. The only small hiccup at this point was that the ALSA sound system would not work. This primarily wa
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SCR5. Using the internal camera as a capture interface. As we can see, that is working, so now we can move over to the next and final stage which will be testing the system with Sun Microsystems Virtual Box and the OpenSolaris derivative BeleniX as the guest based OS. The reason for choosing BeleniX is largely political as I am part of the project in helping identify and fix bugs and issues but also a collaborator in the GUI design process too. Installation of Vbox is trivial and standard s
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get them to run smoothly each and since the system is limited to 2GB memory it will be interesting to see if it locks up or not. The result is below: SCR7. Dual concurrent videos with virtualized operating system. Amazing the system didn't even buckle and rendered everything perfectly without any hitches or glitches in any form or way. Opening windows and applications at this point did become quite slow and sluggish but then with 2GB of memory that would be expected. From the top and Gkrellm2
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My final test to conclude the review and guide will be the data center test where the battery longevity will be tested while hooked up to servers and mainframes. As I am currently on vacation this will be a bit tough to put in practice 'inthefield', however I can run a simulation in the data center I have at home. Because I am using Sun Microsystems SPARC based servers running Solaris operating system, they do not natively have GFX cards meaning that I will need to use a USB → RS242c serial
