In August I got a very nice HP 2510p notebook which is now my main system for development. This took a while for two reasons.
First of all the system did not resume 100% reliably. This has now been solved, although the final patches needed for that will only be in 2.6.29, but that's no problem as I run upstream kernels anyway (I do quite a bit of kernel testing). Kudos have to go to Rafael J. Wysocki who has been doing a huge amount of work to improve the suspend/resume code in the kernel.
Second of all I wanted a docking station so I could continue to use my 19" monitor, with the laptop's LCD as second display. I bought the docking station in December. The challenge then was to automatically (de)activate the external display when the notebook is (un)docked.
Unfortunately there are no ACPI events, but the hp-wmi module (written by Mattew Garrett) sends docking events to the input subsystem. I wrote a small program to catch these events and a script that uses xrandr to switch displays.
There were two issues with that setup. The first docking event was getting lost, but I managed to fix that. And the X server would crash when starting some applications (einstein and virtualbox) after undocking, but there's a patch for that too now.
The notebook is now really well supported and stable.
- suspend/resume works completely reliably
- the docking station works nicely and so does the dual display setup
- wireless works nicely
- the SD card reader works (was used to develop support for MMC/SD cards in Debian Installer)
- the accelerometer works (so I can play Tux Racer and Neverball by tilting the notebook) using the lis3lv02d module, and Pavel Machek recently even added freefall detection, including example code to park the hard disk (targeted for 2.6.30)
- the fingerprint reader works, though I'm not sure I actually want to use that for logging on to the system
The system is currently running Debian/lenny with a KDE desktop and a 2.6.29-rc3 kernel. Working with upstream developers to get this far has really been worthwhile, and fun.