HP Pavilion dm1-4000 Series

J.A. Watson (j.a.watson@bluewin.ch)
Yoran Brondsema (yoran.brondsema@gmail.com)

The latest in this excellent AMD-powered sub-laptop line.

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The good news about this sub-notebook is that it is not cursed with the Synaptic “Click Pad” touchpad as was in its predecessor (dm1-3105ez). The bad news is that they have switched from the Ralink 5390 WiFi adapter which was finally working quite nicely with the latest Linux distributions, back to the Broadcom 4313. It is particularly nice that all of the Fn-keys work (volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down, wireless on/off) and Suspend/Resume work.

The open-source brcmsmac driver included in many distributions does not work well with the Broadcom 4313 adapter. The connection is slow and it recognizes a low signal strength.

The solution is to install the proprietary broadcom-wl driver.

• binaries can be downloaded from http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php.
• OpenSUSE: 1-click install on http://www.opensuse-guide.org/wlan.php.
• Fedora: How-to on http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=239922 (under “How to install and use the Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA driver (broadcom-wl)”).

After installation, replace the brcmsmac driver by the broadcom-wl driver. In /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf append the following two lines.

blacklist brcmsmac
blacklist bcma

On openSUSE 12.1 (and maybe other distributions as well), no action is taken when the lid closes. In most cases, it is convenient for the laptop to suspend to RAM when the lid is closed. To achieve this, perform the following commands.

su
touch /etc/acpi/events/lid

Insert the following in /etc/acpi/events/lid.

event=button/lid
action=/etc/acpi/actions/suspend.sh %e

Now create a file /etc/acpi/actions/suspend.sh with the following contents.

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
/usr/sbin/pm-suspend

Make this file executable.

chmod +x /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

Finally, exit root login.

exit

Now, suspend-to-RAM should be triggered when closing the lid.

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Audio_troubleshooting contains excellent troubleshooting. To enable sound on openSUSE 12.1, you need to install pulseaudio and pavucontrol.

su
zypper in pulseaudio
zypper in pavucontrol
exit

I have loaded several Linux distributions on this laptop, with mixed results.

openSuSE 12.1, Ubuntu 11.10, Linux Mint 12, Fedora 16, PCLinuxOS 2011.09: Installed without problem, and everything except Bluetooth works. Right-click on the Bluetooth Manager icon brings up a window which does not include the “Send files to device…” or “Add a new device…” options. Note that with Fedora 16, the Broadcom 4313 drivers were not included in the original distribution, so after installing you have to get all updates (via wired network or mobile broadband) before the wireless networking will work.

Linux Mint Debian 201109 Gnome: Works after first installation, but when updated to the 3.0 kernel it hangs when booting. Back off to the 2.6.39 kernel, and everything works.