Okay, this my first new thread and my first tutorial, hope it's helpful and I hope I can give something useful back to the community. Understanding of simple terminal commands (like 'sudo mousepad' for editing text files) is assumed
There's been plenty of tips (and problems) over the last year to get Ubuntu running on the HP 2133 mininote, but IMO the device is just a tad too slow to run gnome smoothly.
So, I recently ditched a slightly dodgy installation of ubuntu 8.10 and went for a fresh install of Xubuntu 8.10.
Installation is basically the same as in Ubuntu 8.10, which there are a few tutorials around, but i'll start from scratch.
Step 1 - Download the Xubuntu 8.10 ISO (standard desktop one) from here: http://www.xubuntu.org/get [B] Step 2[/B] - If you don't have an external CD drive to plug into your mininote, then you'll need to create a bootable USB pen drive. Follow the instructions here to do that under windows.
If you have problems booting, try renaming the folder "ISOLINUX" to "SYSLINUX" on the pen drive. [B] Step 3[/B] - Edit the 'Install Xubuntu' line by pressing tab and adding "xforcevesa" (without speechmarks) before the last '--' This will allow Xubuntu to install in safe graphics mode. [B] Step 4[/B] - Follow the usual installation procedures normally.
Step 5 - Upon first boot, you will notice that wireless works out of the box (it does suggest a restricted driver to install, but the default one works fine). You will notice that the screen resolution is wrong.
Step 5 - Download the VIA graphics driver, the xorg.conf file and the readme file from this tutorial here.
*After* installing the drivers by following the steps on the readme file, but *before restarting*, copy the supplied xorg.conf file over.
A simple but crude way to fix the screen resolution problem is to edit the xorf.conf file and do a 'find and replace' where find = "1280x720" and replace is "1280x768".
Step 6 - Reboot (n.b. a full reboot, not just a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)
You should now have a working Xubuntu system on the 2133, I noticed a marked improvement in speed compared Gnome in Ubuntu 8.10. [B] Step 7[/B] - Video playback does not work out of the box, so to get really smooth video playback (smoothest i've seen so far on the 2133) install VLC and use that, but set 'tools'-'preferences'-'video'-'output' to 'X11 Video output'.
Step 8 - To enable compiz fusion, follow the steps here.
After installing compiz fusion you will need to edit '/usr/bin/compiz' and change the line 'whitelist' to include 'via' in the list of drivers. Compiz will then start once initiated, and run pretty smoothly, even video still plays smoothly with compiz enabled and whilst your cube is rotating.
A useful tool (available from add / remove or synaptic is 'Compiz Fusion Icon', this provides a clean way of changing window managers, because you won't want to run compiz all the time, it's a bit slow)
Follow the rest of the steps to set up compiz to autorun at startup if you wish.
Step 9 - To preserve battery life, CPU scaling can be enabled by editing the grub loader using:
'sudo mousepad /boot/grub/menu.lst'
and adding 'acpi_osi="!Windows 2006"' to the end of the first line that begins with 'kernel'.
Hopes this tutorial helps some 2133 Users wanting to go for Xubuntu but put off by the lack of tutorials around. Hope my tutorial was relatively easy to use, like I said, it's my first ever tutorial and I hope it's okay!!
Edit - Webcam and Internal Mic don't work out of the box, I'll post when I've sorted this out on my machine
Please leave feedback and questions if you have any difficulties.