MSI Wind

lucke · 2009-01-18 14:08:32

It might be worth waiting, new Winds with updated Atom platform are coming - it consumes half the power of the current platform, which is yay. Although they aren't as nice visually to me and probably will only come with Windows and a higher price tag. Have a look at MSI announcements on their page.

Wind's wifi ain't that bad, I have zero problems with it and the realtek driver made it into the -staging tree of the .29 kernel, so it should be easily available soonish. Changing the card would void your warranty.

Current kernel and userspace suspend implementations preserve up to half size the memory, only tuxonice can preserve it all.

Last edited by lucke (2009-01-18 14:10:48)

madhatter · 2009-01-18 15:24:42

@ Thoht
Yeah this is unfortunaly written for Debian; This one line can probably be ignored, I think the kernel headers are in base and should be already installed on every Arch system, build utilties like make, gcc, etc. probably too.

Edit:
As I just had installed a new kernel, I needed to recompile the drivers, and it seems you dont need the kernel headers because they seem to be already included in the kernel26-package.

Last edited by madhatter (2009-01-18 15:53:09)

Thoht · 2009-01-18 18:55:38

Does anyone else use hotplugging? It just occured to me that it is unlikely I'd ever really use it, but I enabled it anyway earlier. The only things I usually plug in and out are USB Memory Sticks...

TheBodziO · 2009-01-19 08:54:53

Thoht wrote:

TheBodziO wrote:
In fact, such archwiki page exists but it is a stub currently and isn't written in english: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MSI_Wind_U100 (already asked author to rename it properly).
I registered at the wiki in order to add some content, but I don't understand how to add an English version of that page? Perhaps I should rtfm... :-)

English versions should have names directly denoting topic and international versions should have language name placed in parentheses right after article title, just like that: "title (language)". Still one can create article named "MSI Wind", without the "U100" suffix. This would be even better since there are more than one wind out there . The problem is: in which wiki category should it be placed?

Thoht wrote:

Check the sticker underneath your Wind for what chipset it actually uses for WiFi. I went mad trying to get the various RTL8187SE drivers to work, only to find out after reading this blog entry that I wasn't even using the proper driver. Now how to do that in Arch, I don't know. I'd love to have someone fill me in on how to install the RT2860 driver. :-)

…or use e.g.

lspci | grep -i wireless

TheBodziO · 2009-01-19 09:15:29

leo2501 wrote:

TheBodziO wrote:
Hope this'll help and that you'll get your wind soon!
Thankyou TheBodziO!

No prob.

leo2501 wrote:

im still selling via web my desktop pc to get my wind im more than entusiastic to sacrifice the power of my desktop for the portability and cuteness of the wind

Have a good price! Portability is one of the main reasons for which i bought wind. I still use desktop workhorse for I need more power sometimes but quite often I have my wind with me to use as a swiss army knife (plan to make it portable bootp server for diagnostic purposes).

One thing that I was a bit worried about was keyboard size. This one faded quickly as I sat in front of this little thingie in shop to test it a bit. My hands fell into right place and fingers into right spots . That was it! Positively verified. And I must say that I don't have particularly small hands .

leo2501 wrote:

- I read somewhere that you can change the wifi card? for i think it was a intel one? with better driver support, i'll look into that to see if i can get one of those here in argentina
- As im planning to get suspend2disk/ram working i suppose i need a 1gb swap file isnt it? 1gb ram = 1gb swap space? or a little less/more?

The exact amount of needed swap is dependent on how much of memory will you use. If you'll use less than 1GB then 1GB of swap should be sufficient if you won't use compression during hibernation. If you will on the other hand, the amount of swap can be even about 760MB. I have 1GB swap on my setup just in case but I'm using suspend to ram almost exclusively (much faster and also power efficient).

leo2501 wrote:

Well i suppose that aaaaall my questions and more get their answer when i finally have it and play with it and google the rest, then i'll be more than happy to share the answers!

Which is great! Do I smell the wiki materializing? I'd gladly help with it too.

leo2501 · 2009-01-22 23:15:48

Well... finally I got my wind today... the thing is that i already wiped out XP from it with the "archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.img" installation from USB, but the wireless driver "rtl8187se" to build from AUR requires a "kernel26>=2.6.27-1" that is not the case with my installation... i don't know how to get the wireless connection working if i install with that img, and don't want to wait until the next installation img be out how you guys did it?

Thoht · 2009-01-23 02:59:56

I rebooted mine until the ethernet connection would occasionally start working and then performed the system upgrade.

leo2501 · 2009-01-23 09:16:22

well i found this image that has a 2.6.27 kernel http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=60385 and then, from the desktop PC, i download the tarball and the source in a pendrive and transfer to the wind, a quick makepkg as user and a quick pacman -U as root and "TADAAAA" wireless working, ir doesn't at first, but then i realize that i need to press one time Fn+F11 to get the wifi on, just like in windows, going to work now, i'll install everything now with the wireless working

Last edited by leo2501 (2009-01-23 09:23:14)

TheBodziO · 2009-01-23 09:24:29

leo2501 wrote:

Well... finally I got my wind today... the thing is that i already wiped out XP from it with the "archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.img" installation from USB, but the wireless driver "rtl8187se" to build from AUR requires a "kernel26>=2.6.27-1" that is not the case with my installation... i don't know how to get the wireless connection working if i install with that img, and don't want to wait until the next installation img be out how you guys did it?

First of all… kudos!

Your problem is also easy to solve if you have some storage like usb stick and somewhere to connect to inet to. So, if you do then simply choose one of arch mirrors (from download section) and get to core repo. Then download package with newest kernel. Now you can go to aur and fetch rtl8187se pkgbuild and from it the sources it needs. Then get it to your nbook and do

pacman -U <path/to/kernel/package.pkg.tar.gz>

So newest kernel is in (ethernet working out of the box for rtl8101/8102 with r8169 driver). Reboot and build driver for rtl8187se.
Simple and fast. Also - checked on my own skin

leo2501 · 2009-01-23 09:27:58

TheBodziO wrote:

leo2501 wrote:
Well... finally I got my wind today... the thing is that i already wiped out XP from it with the "archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.img" installation from USB, but the wireless driver "rtl8187se" to build from AUR requires a "kernel26>=2.6.27-1" that is not the case with my installation... i don't know how to get the wireless connection working if i install with that img, and don't want to wait until the next installation img be out how you guys did it?
First of all… kudos!
Your problem is also easy to solve if you have some storage like usb stick and somewhere to connect to inet to. So, if you do then simply choose one of arch mirrors (from download section) and get to core repo. Then download package with newest kernel. Now you can go to aur and fetch rtl8187se pkgbuild and from it the sources it needs. Then get it to your nbook and do
pacman -U <path/to/kernel/package.pkg.tar.gz>
So newest kernel is in (ethernet working out of the box for rtl8101/8102 with r8169 driver). Reboot and build driver for rtl8187se.
Simple and fast. Also - checked on my own skin

Thanks TheBodziO! that's exactly how i did it

TheBodziO · 2009-01-23 10:29:18

leo2501 wrote:

Thanks TheBodziO! that's exactly how i did it

Ahh! Sorry, I didn't read your previous post carefully. In fact only message "another image" reached my mind to get interpreted . That's the origin of my "brilliant" post .

leo2501 · 2009-01-24 10:58:10

well one of the things i still have to get working is the sound, how you configured it? because when i run alsaconf it says that no sound card was detected, and the wiki doesn't say anything about that

TheBodziO · 2009-01-24 22:09:34

leo2501 wrote:

well one of the things i still have to get working is the sound, how you configured it? because when i run alsaconf it says that no sound card was detected, and the wiki doesn't say anything about that

Well… IMHO: sound drivers are rather cheesy for wind's "beeper" as for now. In my wind I have a intel 82801G sound card (as lspci says) which use snd-intel-hda driver. Alsa at the same time says that it's based on ALC888 chipset. Default there are (among some others) controls for "master", "headphones" and "pcm". PCM however is "unmutable"… literally . But in my case card was detected succesfully by alsaconf and gives sound on output.

leo2501 · 2009-01-24 22:28:46

Thanks TheBodziO! i think i forget to modprobe for the driver, lol, well right now i have a weird issue, when i try to play an mp3 file, mplayer show a "Starting playback..." text and doesn't do anything else until i ctrl+c it

leo2501 · 2009-01-25 02:52:28

I tryed with vlc too but it behaves similar, vlc seems to play the file but i can't hear anything and when i try to kill it, the only way to do it is via htop sending a sigkill signal...

do you guys can play multimedia files in your wind's right now? i want to know if is something of my configuration, something i forget to install/configure or some kind of problem with alsa/kernel/sound driver...

thanks!

leo2501 · 2009-01-25 23:57:10

lol, after tryed everything... i reboot solved all the problems, windows come to my mind

now listening to my music

i noticed now that i cant copy text from urxvt to X apps, i installed autocutsel but i dont noticed a change

leo2501 · 2009-02-01 14:13:37

Vighi wrote:

I've just got my wind, and still just have XP installed. Will do something about that in a few days when I have the time.
But just out of curiosity. How does it feel using the Wind with Arch Linux? Does it use more power with Arch Linux then with windows XP?

Well Vighi, i can assure you (because I have 2 Wind's, mine with Arch, girlfriend one with XP) with Arch, you actually "feel" faster bootup and "ready" (usable) state, but the accelerated graphics on the other hand are incredibly faster in XP, for example google-earth, celestia, stellarium, all those opengl apps run great in XP and are really usable, in Arch i can only use stellarium and it feels really slow compared to XP, earth and celestia are unusable at 1-2 fps...

On the other hand watching 720p videos in XP is easy with coreavc in klite codec pack, in Arch with mplayer i get choppy playback

Im looking forward to that official MSI BIOS upgrade to 1.09 want to know if some of you guys did it and all works ok, because with that upgrade you can overclock to 24% the performance

TheBodziO · 2009-02-01 20:20:32

Actually the newest bios is 1.0b (dated 20 I 2009). I've got 1.0a right now and haven't noticed any glitches so far. Be advised though: I didn't OC'd my wind so there's nothing I can tell about it.

Onyros · 2009-02-01 23:05:35

leo2501 wrote:

Well Vighi, i can assure you (because I have 2 Wind's, mine with Arch, girlfriend one with XP) with Arch, you actually "feel" faster bootup and "ready" (usable) state, but the accelerated graphics on the other hand are incredibly faster in XP, for example google-earth, celestia, stellarium, all those opengl apps run great in XP and are really usable, in Arch i can only use stellarium and it feels really slow compared to XP, earth and celestia are unusable at 1-2 fps...

Try starting up Google Earth, going to View --> Disabling Atmosphere.

leo2501 · 2009-02-01 23:13:24

Onyros wrote:

leo2501 wrote:
Well Vighi, i can assure you (because I have 2 Wind's, mine with Arch, girlfriend one with XP) with Arch, you actually "feel" faster bootup and "ready" (usable) state, but the accelerated graphics on the other hand are incredibly faster in XP, for example google-earth, celestia, stellarium, all those opengl apps run great in XP and are really usable, in Arch i can only use stellarium and it feels really slow compared to XP, earth and celestia are unusable at 1-2 fps...
Try starting up Google Earth, going to View --> Disabling Atmosphere.

wow thanks! that REALLY helps

Vighi · 2009-04-29 16:36:31

I was wondering if anyone had a clue about using the VGA-out on the wind?
I would want to be able to connect my TV to it and resolution 1024 * 768. I've successfully been able to clone my screen with 800*600 working alright. But if I set only to use TV, it will go unresponsive within minutes; If I press a lot of buttons I can hear the wind working, but no new frames on the TV.

One thing Linux needs to get better on is using more then one monitor, and making it easy to switch. Was a pain on my stationary PC and now a pain on the wind.

leo2501 · 2009-04-29 22:14:55

Vighi wrote:

I was wondering if anyone had a clue about using the VGA-out on the wind?
I would want to be able to connect my TV to it and resolution 1024 * 768. I've successfully been able to clone my screen with 800*600 working alright. But if I set only to use TV, it will go unresponsive within minutes; If I press a lot of buttons I can hear the wind working, but no new frames on the TV.
One thing Linux needs to get better on is using more then one monitor, and making it easy to switch. Was a pain on my stationary PC and now a pain on the wind.

i have no problems with arandr, using no desktop environmen, just dwm, you might get the "(EE) intel(0): underrun on pipe A!" error, when the screen goes black, just CTRL+ALT+F1 and see the output, i cant seem to find a fix, but dont looked to much for it, because i dont use so much...

leo2501 · 2009-05-16 23:37:00

Well after cried a lot about my crashing X, i tried everything i could find, different accel methods, and all three drivers from extra and AUR, the thing is that with the "vesa" driver, everything works great, no locked computer at startx, no random unresponsiveness, no nothing, but resolution were stuck at 800x600, tried a lot of things, but can't achieve 1024x600, so im back with the intel driver, this time the "xf86-video-intel-newest" from AUR, with UXA accelmethod, so i want to know, if im the only MSI-OWNER that has this troubles, because i see no one upset in this msi wind topic, just curious you can say...

here's my xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "X.org Configured"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
#    InputDevice    "Touchpad"  "SendCoreEvents"
#    InputDevice    "USB Mouse" "CorePointer"
#    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection


Section "Files"
    ModulePath   "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/local/"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
    FontPath     "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
EndSection


Section "Module"
#    Load  "ddc"
    Load  "dbe"
    Load  "dri"
    Load  "glx"
    Load  "bitmap" # bitmap-fonts
#    Load  "type1"
    Load  "vbe"
#    Load  "record"
    Load  "extmod"
#    Load  "freetype"
    Load  "synaptics"
EndSection


Section "ServerFlags"
#    Option "AllowMouseOpenFail"  "true"
#    Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
#    Option "AIGLX" "true"
    Option "BlankTime" "0" #This blanks screen
    Option "StandbyTime" "0" #This is DPMS
    Option "SuspendTime" "0" #DPMS
    Option "OffTime" "0" #DPMS
EndSection


#Section "InputDevice"
#    Identifier  "Keyboard0"
#    Driver      "keyboard"
#    Option      "CoreKeyboard"
#    Option      "XkbRules" "xorg"
#    Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
#    Option      "XkbLayout" "es"
#EndSection


#Section "InputDevice"
#    Identifier      "USB Mouse"
#    Driver          "mouse"
#    Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
#    Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
#    Option          "Protocol"              "IMPS/2"
#    Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
#    Option          "Buttons"               "5"
#EndSection


#Section "InputDevice"
#    Identifier  "Touchpad"
#    Driver  "synaptics"
#    Option  "Device"   "/dev/input/mouse0"
#    Option  "Protocol"   "auto-dev"
#    Option  "LeftEdge"   "130"
#    Option  "RightEdge"   "840"
#    Option  "TopEdge"   "130"
#    Option  "BottomEdge"   "640"
#    Option  "FingerLow"   "7"
#    Option  "FingerHigh"   "8"
#    Option  "MaxTapTime"   "180"
#    Option  "MaxTapMove"   "110"
#    Option  "EmulateMidButtonTime"   "75"
#    Option  "VertScrollDelta"   "20"
#    Option  "HorizScrollDelta"   "20"
#    Option  "MinSpeed"   "0.25"
#    Option  "MaxSpeed"   "0.50"
#    Option  "AccelFactor"   "0.010"
#    Option  "EdgeMotionMinSpeed"   "200"
#    Option  "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed"   "200"
#    Option  "UpDownScrolling"   "1"
#    Option  "CircularScrolling"   "1"
#    Option  "CircScrollDelta"   "0.1"
#    Option  "CircScrollTrigger"   "2"
#    Option  "SHMConfig"   "on"
#    Option  "Emulate3Buttons"   "on"
#    Option   "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
#    Option   "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
#EndSection


Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "Monitor0"
    Option "DPMS" "true"
#    VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
#    ModelName    "Monitor Model"
#    Modeline "1024x600" 75 63.20  1024 1080 1184 1344  600 601 604 627  -HSync +Vsync
EndSection


Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"                # [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"               # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"               # <i>
        #Option     "CacheLines"             # <i>
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"                # [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                    # [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"                  # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"              # [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"           # <i>
        #Option     "PageFlip"               # [<bool>]
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
    BoardName   "Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
#    Option      "AccelMethod"            "XAA"
#    Option      "DRI"                    "True"
#    Option      "NoDDC"                  "True"
#    Option      "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"  "True"
#    Option      "EnablePageFlip"         "True"
#    Option      "RenderAccel"            "True"
#    Option      "monitor-VGA"    "external"
#    Option      "monitor-LVDS"    "internal"
    Option      "AccelMethod"            "UXA"
    Option      "DRI"                    "true"
#    Option      "RenderAccel"            "True"
#    Option      "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
#    Option      "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
    BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection


Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Screen0"
    Device     "Card0"
    Monitor    "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth 24
    Virtual 2704 1050
    SubSection "Display"
        Viewport   0 0
        Depth     8
        Modes     "1680x1050" "1024x600" "800x600" "640x480"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection "Display"
        Viewport   0 0
        Depth     16
        Modes     "1680x1050" "1024x600" "800x600" "640x480"
    EndSubSection
    SubSection "Display"
        Viewport   0 0
        Depth     24
        Modes     "1680x1050" "1024x600" "800x600" "640x480"
    EndSubSection
EndSection


#Section "DRI"
#    Mode 0666
#EndSection


#Section "Extensions"
#    Option "Composite" "enable"
#EndSection

flammenwurfer · 2009-05-18 16:35:14

I haven't tried using the vga out yet on my wind. I will test it and try your xorg and see if I'm getting the same problems.

madhatter · 2009-05-19 20:18:35

I recently reinstalled Arch on mine - I'm too lazy for now to edit my xorg.conf after the first tries resulted in a complete lockup, but it works pretty good without any configuration (even uses the intel driver and the right resolution) - did you try running X without configuration?

Arch Linux

#51 2009-01-18 14:08:32

Re: MSI Wind

#52 2009-01-18 15:24:42

Re: MSI Wind

#53 2009-01-18 18:55:38

Re: MSI Wind

#54 2009-01-19 08:54:53

Re: MSI Wind

#55 2009-01-19 09:15:29

Re: MSI Wind

#56 2009-01-22 23:15:48

Re: MSI Wind

#57 2009-01-23 02:59:56

Re: MSI Wind

#58 2009-01-23 09:16:22

Re: MSI Wind

#59 2009-01-23 09:24:29

Re: MSI Wind

#60 2009-01-23 09:27:58

Re: MSI Wind

#61 2009-01-23 10:29:18

Re: MSI Wind

#62 2009-01-24 10:58:10

Re: MSI Wind

#63 2009-01-24 22:09:34

Re: MSI Wind

#64 2009-01-24 22:28:46

Re: MSI Wind

#65 2009-01-25 02:52:28

Re: MSI Wind

#66 2009-01-25 23:57:10

Re: MSI Wind

#67 2009-02-01 14:13:37

Re: MSI Wind

#68 2009-02-01 20:20:32

Re: MSI Wind

#69 2009-02-01 23:05:35

Re: MSI Wind

#70 2009-02-01 23:13:24

Re: MSI Wind

#71 2009-04-29 16:36:31

Re: MSI Wind

#72 2009-04-29 22:14:55

Re: MSI Wind

#73 2009-05-16 23:37:00

Re: MSI Wind

#74 2009-05-18 16:35:14

Re: MSI Wind

#75 2009-05-19 20:18:35

Re: MSI Wind

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