Richard Bucker

HP Devone Reinstall

Posted at — May 20, 2023

I have not posted in a long while; just not feeling it. But here’s a collection of thoughts about Linux and the HP devone.

HP decided to market a, limited run, specialty Linux laptop based on pop_os from System76. I had the sense that 76 was a partner but it’s also possible that HP went at it alone. Well, in less than a year HP either ran out of stock or it was not profitable enough so the product was discontinued.

As an aside… I have 2 minisforum NUC devices that are working well. They also run pop_os but there was about 6 months where the video drivers failed and I used the HP devone or my chromebooks. The Chromebook have some limited VPN capabilities and the HP had some screen issues of it’s own.

And so here we are again…

I have been professing about simple desktops. Today is no different. As a point of comparison I installed OpenBSD on a new NUC in less than an hour and was able to connect to my corporate VPN and download my projects. I did have one quirk which was the dracula project skin for tmux. [a] I was missing a configuration of LC_ALL in order to get the powerline font to work. [b] while dracula works great in an X-terminal it does not work on the console proper.

One co-worker, many years my senoir, said he updates his dev machines when operations updates theirs. I was struck by that because when something goes wrong it’s a question of who’s going to get the blame and which of the kids are going without shoes. Which is why I like just the one.

reinstalling pop_os on HP devone

I’m hoping to collect some notes here. Maybe some support member at HP will reply or maybe someone at system76 will comment.

At this point not that I checked the partitions with … df -h. What I determined is that the /boot/efi partition is smaller than it was from HP. So aparrently someone knew what they were doing and it’s beyond the basic pop_os installer.

At this point the ambient light filter (auto brightness) is not working well, the keyboard backlight, and wakeup are all not working well. I assume there are some device drivers but I cannot find them on hp.com. I created a ticket and waiting for a reply.

… more to come.