Hp Compaq 2230s Review and Step by Step Guide: A UNIX perspective! By: Kaya Şaman
Contents 1. External 1 2. Internal and Tech Specs 1 3. Operating system, usage and capabilities 4 4. Conclusion 19 3.1Install 3.2Configuration 3.3Wireless setup 3.4Upgrading system components 3.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Network interface list and hardware assignment.
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.
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 Extra:tsf=00000a61dbf1d037 Extra: Last beacon: 2432ms ago Table3. Iwlist scan output. As can be seen from the above output that various WAP's have been detected meaning that the 802.11 controller is functioning properly.
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.
;; 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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course the system was not running on AC power meaning that this was a good test for the battery life of the four cells that made up the battery pack of this notebook. Obviously this is a simulation and in reality one would be potentially connecting to tens or hundreds of these systems whether it be servers, routers or switches in the data center or data farm. From the screenshot below it is evident that the system had the potential to last for two and a half hours solely on batter power.
