Tom’s Extelopedia

The HP2133 Mini Note is a nice ultraportable laptop with a great keyboard and a great screen.

I bought it with SuSE pre-installed. The SuSE installation on it works well for what it is; you can do web browsing, word processing, etc on it just fine. Issues with the SuSE distribution are:

• When trying to install additional software, it asks for a SuSE DVD; there’s no documentation on where to get one or how to select an on-line repository. Most people are therefore probably going to be stuck with the pre-installed software.
• SuSE comes with a bunch of services preinstalled that make the machine unnecessarily slow and lower the battery life (Beagle, Tomboy, etc.).
• The X11 configuration that ships with it doesn’t support 1024×768@60Hz or 800×600@60Hz, the two most standard frequencies for presentations.

Basically, it looks like HP slapped the standard SuSE install on it and left it at that, with little afterthought or adaptation. I’m sure for their Windows build, they are going to spend a lot of time trying to make it work. SuSE, however, should be doing a better job, for example, enabling on-line repositories by default.

For installing Ubuntu 8.04 on the HP 2133, please see this page.