Upgrading the HP ze4600 to Ubuntu 8.10

I got my hands on the HP ze4600 again and off I went to upgrade the Ubuntu installation to 8.10.

I have a friend who says he never bothers with the upgrade - he always just does a fresh install. I see his point, but I always hold out hope that the upgrade will be quicker and less painful. So now for my experience on the HP laptop.

Ran the upgrade and all went pretty smoothly. It wanted to overwrite my /boot/grub/menu.lst file, which I had modified to make Windows XP the first and default choice. I first tried to use the merge tool, but I couldn't figure it out. So I let the install overwrite it. Of course when the computer rebooted at the end of the install, windows was no longer a choice. No problem - the old menu.lst file was saved with an obvious filename, copied the Windows XP lines back into the current file, and problem solved.

The unexpected happy news...WiFi suddenly started to work!! I had never been able to get it to recognize the Broadcom 4306 rev 2 chip. Now it immediately recognized the proprietary hardware with the b43 module (or something like that - will grab a screenshot next time I'm allowed on the computer).

An upgrade to Xubuntu 8.10

I resisted for a few weeks, but I couldn't hold out any longer. Despite having no complaints with Xubuntu 8.04 on my old Dell Latitude L400, I had to upgrade to 8.10.

The upgrade went smoothly. I was happy to see that my install and setup of wicd and all my Firefox add-ons carried over. The problem with the laptop going to sleep mode 5 seconds are starting up returned, but I expected that since I allowed the upgrade to overwrite the changes I had made to my /etc/default/acpi-support file described in my previous post.

1. The First Step Towards Resolving the Sleep Problem
I have suspected that the problem stems from running the laptop without a battery installed (mine is in such bad shape, the computer complains if I put it in). I decided to test this theory indirectly, so I booted with the kernel options "noapm noacpi acpi=off apm=off". Once booted I went to Applications->Settings->Power Management. I think there was a tab there called "On Battery Power" where I chose "Do Nothing" when battery power is low. I intended to post a screen shot, but that tab has diasppeared (why??).



The results:

• The laptop tries to go to sleep once during boot, but once awoken, it usually finishes booting with no further problems. I've noticed that it does a battery check during startup, so I'll try to disable that and see if it fixes the problem.
  
• The whole system has a bit of flakiness. Sometimes my WiFi card doesn't get power during boot-up, sometimes it does. Sliding it out of the pc card slot and back in usually does the trick. Sometimes it doesn't finish shutdown, and sometimes the hard disk doesn't come alive at all on boot (I think when I do a restart rather than a full shutdown). I'll keep looking into these issues.

2. The Second Step Towards Resolving the Sleep Problem
I went to Applications->System->Services and disabled acpid and apmd (and bluetooth too since this machine doesn't have it).

The results:

1. Smooth boot from cold start - hooray!
2. Standby mode works. Maybe it did before too, never tested it.
3. The "restart" option doesn't work. The computer restarts, but the hard disk appears to never come alive. Not a significant problem really, just a little annoying.

Next Steps
1. Try disabling acpid and apmd independently
2. Install in "desktop" mode rather than "laptop" mode so there is no expectation of a battery?
3. Search on why my hard disk might not comeback after a "restart".