I have an HP tx1003au laptop which is known to be slightly difficult to configure with linux. There is a huge thread(33 pages so far) on ubuntuforums.org specifically for this series of machines. I’ve been following this thread right since the beginning and I am posting the steps that I had to take. The information in this thread is a lot more than you need and it took me hours to go through it and get every piece of hardware going one by one.

Booting from live CD

As with recent ubuntu distributions gutsy comes with a live CD. I was not able to boot from the live CD directly. I had a similar problem with Feisty so I knew that I need to supply a certain set of kernel parameters to get my laptop to boot. The following parameters seem to work for me

quiet splash noapic irqpoll

If you are new to linux then follow the following steps.

Load the CD in your CD ROM and restart the computer. You will be shown a screen with options. Press F6 for “other options”. Now a line of text would be visible at the bottom of the screen. Type “noapic irqpoll” at the end of the line(before the –) and press enter.

Installation

Once I was able to boot from the live CD the installation went off smoothly. The only thing was that after installing the boot parameters were not automatically added to the boot configuration. So don’t restart your system straight away after installation. Edit the following file em>/boot/grub/menu.lst and add the boot parameters string at the end of the line that looks something like this

kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=aa0998d4-b656-4ad4-854f-8fe9d950d17f quiet splash noapic irqpoll

Wireless

The first thing that I needed to configure was wireless networking. For this I used ndiswrapper. The instructions are given very nicely in this post.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3491929&postcount=257

Note: I needed to install wine since I wasn’t able to extract the driver directly from the exe. For installing wine type this in a terminal window(applications -> accessories -> terminal)

sudo apt-get install wine

And after installing wine I double clicked on the driver file and installed it. Then I was able to locate the driver file by browsing the the following directory on my system
~/.wine/drive_c/SWSetup (~ stands for home directory)

For connecting and disconecting to wireless networks you can use the networking application provided by default which can be accessed via system -> administration -> network. But I prefer to use the software wifi-radar which seems to work better in my case. For installing wifi radar type this in a terminal

sudo apt-get install wifi-radar

Note: You might need to enable some repositories for using the above software. For more information see this
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories

Audio

The audio didn’t work by default. To make it work I had to add the following line to the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack position_fix=0 single_cmd=0

I had to restart after this. The audio now works but the front jacks are not recognized. I’ve read that the front jacks can be made to work by downloading and compiling the latest version of alsa drivers. I will try that at a later stage. For the moment I just wanted basic functionality running so that I could start using my system for some coding

Edit: The audio works perfectly after compiling and installing latest alsa drivers. Here are the instructions.

1. Download the latest alsa drivers from here
   ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
2. Untar the archive

   $ tar -xvf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
   

3. Compile and build the drivers

   $ cd alsa-driver-1.0.15/
   $ ./configure
   $ make
   $ sudo make install
   

   make should take a few minutes because it is compiling the source code.
   (in case you get a message that make cannot be found then you need to install the “build-essentials” package)

4. Reboot your system

Audio should be working now. In case it doesn’t try unmuting the controls in the volume mixer or increasing the volume.

Things that work out of the box

Not everything required tweaking and some of the things worked by default. Here’s what I was able to test.

• Hardware buttons (Sound volume buttons, DVD button and playback control buttons)
• Memory card slot (tried Memory Stick Pro)
• Infra-red remote
• Microphones on the screen
• Web cam (To use the webcam select the V4L2 as the video driver in your selected application. I tested this with Ekiga)

Display Drivers(NVidia)

For installing the display drivers System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager. Click on the Nvidia accelerated graphics driver checkbox. The drivers should be installed automatically.

Touchscreen

This is the most tricky bit. With my previous installation I spent many days making this work. And I was hoping that this time it would take less time. I still have to calibrate the touch screen and I will be able to do that later in the evening. In the meantime here are the steps that I followed to get it running and some notes that I had from last time. The basic steps are given in this post.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2792971&postcount=16

Edit: The touchscreen works perfectly and is very easy to setup based on this post by waspbr on the ubuntu forums
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4197376&postcount=542

External Display

I tried connecting my laptop to a projector. The standard System -> Administration -> Screens and Graphics did not work for me. I then installed nvidia-settings.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

After installing you can launch the application by typing “nvidia-settings” in the shell. This seems to work well at the moment and I was able to connect to an external display.

Things I did not try

• Getting the remaining buttons on the panel to work
• Internal modem

That’s it for the moment. Hope it helps save time for others with a similar setup.