I bought this must’ve been 2016. It was a bad move from the get-go, because the hard disk is only 32Gb. And it had Windows 10, and 32Gb is only just enough to get Windows on. Pretty soon I had to use an outboard hard drive to be able to update windows, and by about 2019 even that didn’t work. It’s a shame, because it’s otherwise serviceable, but totally non-upgradeable – the ‘hard drive’ is an eMMC soldered to the board. It lasted me three years. I did like the light weight and silent operation, but the overall gutless performance and slower and slower startup was bad.
I could use a linux laptop
I had been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi4 for amateur radio field use, but wrangling a Pi in the field for things like SOTA is a mess, because a Pi plus all the odds and sods you need to make it work is a collection of parts flying in loose formation, and unlike a DC3 they don’t always work well together. It’s bad enough connecting the computer to the radio via analogue audio connectors 1, having to connect the Pi plus screen to a Bluetooth keyboard plus some sort of battery to USB-C power contraption gets a bit much in the field although it all works fine on the bench. I had already run the FLdigi and WSJT-X software on the HP Stream in Windows so I knew it was capable of decent performance, better than the Pi4 which struggles a bit to decode WSJT-X in a reasonable time.
However, I had heard bad things about trying Linux on the HP stream, because the Wifi card is very proprietary. The Ubuntu drivers seem to have fixed that now
It was surprisingly easy to load once I quit trying to install on the UEFI BIOS. I uses Xubuntu LTS 20.04, downloading the iso and putting this onto a USB stick using balenaEtcher. I found the install instructions for Xubuntu hard to find and sketchy, but they are good enough to feature this hint
If you don’t already know how to install Xubuntu, then please read this great tutorial, which applies as much to Xubuntu as to Ubuntu.
which is indeed great, and took me from there. But first I had to switch off the UEFI BIOS. It’s not that obvious to me what advantage UEFI gives me with a machine with a whopping 32Gb of disk space which is far from the 2Tb limit UEFI is supposed to fix, so legacy is fine with me.
A disadvantage of linux on a laptop, apart from the general gangly geeky oddballness of linux on the desktop as opposed to on the server is battery life is not optimised so well.
Enabling legacy BIOS
Press esc repeatedly during boot, and then when it offers you the option go into F10 BIOS setup. Under system config select boot options which takes you here
You want to enable Legacy boot, and disable secure boot. If I don’t do that my Xubuntu installer can’t see the hard disk.
Once you have done that, save and reboot, again pressing esc on startup. This time simply select F9 Boot device options and boot off the USB stick, and from then on it was a regular, though non-internet-connected (because of the oddball WiFi card) Xubuntu install. I selected to install on the entire hard disk and blow away the old Windows install, because this machine is never going to run Windows again, because it can’t. It was either going to run Linux or head for the bin.
The install went OK, and the wifi card came up. It seems to lack a bit of sensitivity compared to the windows drivers, but it’s perfectly serviceable within the house. The trackpad works OK, the one thing I couldn’t get working was the camera, which I don’t find a huge disadvantage, and it was pretty dire when it did work.
End result – one serviceable and lightweight linux computer. With about 19Gb free hard disk, rather than < 1Gb, at the end of its Windows service life.
Running WSJT-X
Once I had switched to using alsa this worked OK after lining up the transmit level and mic gain, I contacted YO22WARD in Romania on 17m and a station in Sardinia on 30m. The Alsa config sticks across a reboot, which is nice, and not always a given on linux in my experience.
Sound is always grief on linux
I used a ZLP USB audio interface for the sound card rather than the onboard sound. That has an internal vox detecting the signal to key transmit. Life is too short to fiddle about with trying to use the onboard audio out and try and stop any sounds going out, and I used the raw alsa interface, which is at the bottom of the WSJTX audio settings scroll, invisible at first. I set levels with sudo alsamixer and F6 to pick the right card, and then sudo alsactl store. I could use the CAT serial interface for PTT but using VOX ensures the signal is present before TX.
Sound is always a pain to configure on linux. You have the choice of ALSA, OSS, Pulseaudio, Jack, and sometimes it seems they all fight it out for supremacy. I’ve had better luck using ALSA than any of the other overlays. The new Bullseye version of Raspbian is an abomination with sound, not only do you have to create a new user other than pi to be able to use XRDP, but that user then can’t see the sound hardware, though a sudo aplay -l reveals that it is there at the bare metal level.
So as well as having it mostly in one box it’s nice to be able to take a break from Raspberry Pi audio which has taken a step backwards with favouring pulseaudio IMO. I’m sure it’s all great if it works right, but Linux audio is ghastly enough without fighting several layers of audio abstraction. In ALSA I trust…
- people who have bought their rig in the last ten years usually have a USB interface, which solves some of the interfacing issues while creating others, but mine is 15 years old now so none of this newfangled tech :( ↩
Glad to see that you’re moving from the Dark Side! You’re right – sound is an abomination on Linux and it beggars belief why there are so many different subsystems. These days I stick to ALSA and if the software doesn’t support it then it gets deleted. I may be missing out on some things but my general mental well-being is a lot better. I’ve also had trouble with BIOS but usually setting the “Secure Boot” firmly to “off” fixes it.
One minor issue I’ve had with the Pi is that some of the more obscure packages aren’t available for the ARM processor and you have to compile yourself. You should avoid any of those issues with the HP.
Sound really is the Achilles Heel of Linux. I was running the Pi with one of the radio programs which used the sound card, under Alsa. I spark up a web browser to listen to my signals, and all of a sudden it demands the audio output. Just goes grab it, doesn’t stick up a dialog box saying the sound card is in use, or even mixing the two sound signals together, which is what Windows does, which most of the time is sort of what you want. The original program starts grizzling that the sound card is unreachable. I initially assume this is local RF feedback, only after trying it again and seeing the program come good after closing the browser do I realise Linux doesn’t multitask sound, at any rate on Pi.
Sound fighting like rats in a sack takes me back to DOS days 😉 But once I jumped to the error of my ways and canned the browser it came good. Just one thing at one time…
> I’ve also had trouble with BIOS but usually setting the “Secure Boot” firmly to “off” fixes it.
Didn’t realise this is a general principle with Linux installs, I will take note for future use!
The HP stream works really quite well with Xubuntu. I haven’t observed particularly poor battery performance either – still a win!
I got this, running debian on it. The wifi seems to barely work, I’m getting 60% dropped packets in the same room as the wifi router. Do you remember what driver/setup you used for the wifi?
I have sparked this up, and while I do agree the wifi is the worst that I have in anything it’s quite serviceable about 10m from the router. I ran speedtest and it gave 30MBps down 5 up, which is good enough IMO. Following these guys
sudo lshw -class network
*-network
description: Wireless interface
product: BCM43142 802.11b/g/n
vendor: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
logical name: wlo1
version: 01
serial: 44:1c:ff:a3:be:29
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.271 (r587334) ip=192.168.1.192 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
resources: irq:19 memory:91000000-91007fff
and
lsmod | grep wlwl 6467584 0
cfg80211 970752 1 wl