Ubuntu 10.10 problems on HP Pavilion dm4-1160

I just received today my little 14'' notebook HP pavilion dm4-1160. $700 after rebate for an Intel i5 - M450 at 2.4GHz, 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 500GB at 7200 rpm; it's a good deal regarding the performances. The only regret is the chip Intel HD Graphic and the screen resolution 1366x768 pixels.

Of course, Windows 7 Home edition 64bits is preinstalled and it's not possible to refuse it (just to get an extra discount). To finish with M$, the DVD of the OS is not provided. The Microsoft totalitarianism...

Anyway, I decided to try the new Ubuntu 10.10 in Live CD; I changed the boot sequence to boot first on the DVD rom, I placed my CD with Ubuntu 10.10 and turned on the computer. The CD started to boot, the first line indicating the kernel version appeared briefly (isolinux 4.01....) and nothing else! The screen returned to black while the DVD drive worked.

I tried Ubuntu 10.10 64bits and 32bits, Ubuntu 10.04 32bits, all of them loaded without any success and then I dicovered the backlight was turned off automatically during the initialization. The solution is to press the key 'f3' when the screen turns black to switch on the backlight, and then Ubuntu 10.10 works almost perfectly. The wireless is painless. The only problem is the touchpad which is erratic when 2 fingers are on the pad. The solution is to keep just one finger. The touchpad freezes sometimes for a while and restarts. The best solution is to use an external mouse connected to the usb port.

Funny thing: I discovered that in accessibility mode, the touchpad works almost correctly!

I tried Fedora 11, the graphic card worked correctly and the backlight did not turn off. I had a big problem with the touchpad too, so I plugged a simple mouse on the usb port and then almost everything worked perfectly. In fact, the main problem is the wireless connection. Fedora 11 is pretty old; I will try Fedora 13 the next week and I will post my results. Check my post of Nov. 5, I tested Fedora 14 Livecd.