Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

pdixon · 2014-04-21 06:45:08

gsilvers wrote:

So this thing seems like it would work wonders for an on the go machine. Anyone mind answering a question or two?
1 - Is the 2gb of ram enough, I'm relatively spoiled with a 8gb main machine but is 2gb enough to run gnome and a web browser? I saw a 4gb touch floating around on amazon. Worth the 30 dollars extra?
2 - Is the battery life similar to what is advertised on chrome os?

It does make a very nice on the go machine. To answer your questions:

1. I have the 2GB model. I'm running a full Gnome 3.12 install on mine. I normal have Chromium open with ~10 tabs, along with a terminal or two and an emacs session. I haven't notice any issue with a shortage of RAM running this load.

2. I've never actually run the battery all the way flat. An afternoons programming use leaves the battery 60-70% full. I'd say the battery life is in the same range as what chrome os claims.

gsilvers · 2014-04-21 12:43:04

pdixon wrote:

It does make a very nice on the go machine. To answer your questions:
1. I have the 2GB model. I'm running a full Gnome 3.12 install on mine. I normal have Chromium open with ~10 tabs, along with a terminal or two and an emacs session. I haven't notice any issue with a shortage of RAM running this load.
2. I've never actually run the battery all the way flat. An afternoons programming use leaves the battery 60-70% full. I'd say the battery life is in the same range as what chrome os claims.

Pretty much the workload I'd be pushing it's way., Thanks for the info I'll check one out in person this week.

nariox · 2014-04-21 14:44:08

gsilvers wrote:

pdixon wrote:
It does make a very nice on the go machine. To answer your questions:
1. I have the 2GB model. I'm running a full Gnome 3.12 install on mine. I normal have Chromium open with ~10 tabs, along with a terminal or two and an emacs session. I haven't notice any issue with a shortage of RAM running this load.
2. I've never actually run the battery all the way flat. An afternoons programming use leaves the battery 60-70% full. I'd say the battery life is in the same range as what chrome os claims.
Pretty much the workload I'd be pushing it's way., Thanks for the info I'll check one out in person this week.

If you find a model with 4gb for 30USD more, I'd say it's worth it. 2gb should be enough, but it's always good to have a little bit more, as the board is non upgradeable.
However, having said that, 2gb is pretty enough for me. Also, chrome OS usually uses 3gb zramswap. Gnome-shell uses anywhere from 5 to 10% of the system's RAM.

The battery life is really incredible. I'm using TLP and using powersaving on i915 and ath9k. I get anywhere from 7 to 14 hours of charge with minor usage (taking notes at class). It's my first laptop that I don't have to charge every night.

parchedas · 2014-04-21 22:22:53

nariox wrote:

The battery life is really incredible. I'm using TLP and using powersaving on i915 and ath9k. I get anywhere from 7 to 14 hours of charge with minor usage (taking notes at class). It's my first laptop that I don't have to charge every night.

That's fantastic, I would love to have those battery numbers.

So are you doing just this?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Po … interfaces
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … ng_Options

Have you changed the stock TLP config?

nariox · 2014-04-21 23:52:37

Yes, I've changed TLP to use deadline for the SSD, and enabled pm.runtime for all devices. I've also enabled btcoex_enable, bt_ant_diversity and ps_enable on ath9k. In my university I get about 150mbps on WiFi (I myself was surprised after having to deal with a buggy intel 4965 and a broadcom bcm4331 for some time, it's nice to see a driver working nicely with windows.

You can also check if tlp is working properly by using powertop.

parchedas · 2014-04-22 00:39:55

FWIW, 3.15-rc2 doesn't fix suspend.

nariox · 2014-04-22 21:48:33

therealarchdaemon wrote:

On a side note, has anyone tried filing a bug report for this yet? This does seem to be a kernel issue, since suspend still works with older kernels.

Do you know how to report a bug in the kernel? Should I report it first in Arch or upstream? I've never done a bug report as I've just migrated from Ubuntu a semester ago.

therealarchdaemon · 2014-04-24 01:26:20

nariox wrote:

therealarchdaemon wrote:
On a side note, has anyone tried filing a bug report for this yet? This does seem to be a kernel issue, since suspend still works with older kernels.
Do you know how to report a bug in the kernel? Should I report it first in Arch or upstream? I've never done a bug report as I've just migrated from Ubuntu a semester ago.

You should generally only report bugs to Arch if it's a packaging issue. This doesn't seem to be a packaging issue, so I'd report it upstream.

nariox · 2014-04-24 01:43:11

therealarchdaemon wrote:

nariox wrote:
therealarchdaemon wrote:
On a side note, has anyone tried filing a bug report for this yet? This does seem to be a kernel issue, since suspend still works with older kernels.
Do you know how to report a bug in the kernel? Should I report it first in Arch or upstream? I've never done a bug report as I've just migrated from Ubuntu a semester ago.
You should generally only report bugs to Arch if it's a packaging issue. This doesn't seem to be a packaging issue, so I'd report it upstream.

I've found this bug. I can't say it's the same as the reporter is using a C2D-era processor, but I thought I should try this one first before possibly opening a duplicate bug

kirkpuppy · 2014-04-26 14:21:33

Hello all. I just wanted to say thanks for all the great info here for the c720. I'm one of the maintainers of Fatdog64, so I don't use Arch, but I wanted to pass on some things I've found with the C720. After applying the kernel patches the click pad works, but was still pretty annoying to me. I like having one finger resting on the left button and another finger moving the pointer. I found this patch here:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66532#c5

I patched xf86-input-synaptics-1.7.4 with it and after setting AreaBottomEdge=400 I can have my finger on the left bottom and scroll around. Maybe someone else already posted this, if so my apologies.
Also I have the same problem with suspend and resume. It seems to suspend fine, the light on the front starts flashing, but reboots when you try to resume. I'm using 3.12.9, I'm sure with a very different kernel config and set of patches than Arch. I don't have the commit in the bug report above and I have the same problem. All my other laptops suspend and resume fine with this kernel. Don't know if any of this is helpful, thought I'd pass it along.

n8henrie · 2014-04-26 23:01:04

Does anyone else have their fan spin up and down constantly when the computer is idle?

nariox · 2014-04-27 00:38:20

@kirkpuppy: you should try upgrading to 3.12.18. Also, are you using the fixes suggested in the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ac … ng_suspend? A fix might be available there. I only started using the Acer C720 days before 3.13 was out, so I can't tell much about the experience in 3.12

@n8henrie: not that I'm aware. Are you sure the computer is really idle? It might be some daemon going crazy in the background.

kschwarz · 2014-04-27 00:46:43

Hey all, at first thank you all for this... got an awesome new "chromebook" out of it. My question is now can one explain how to get the ambilight sensor to work in noobish language? I think the force in me is not strong enough for managing it on my own...

Thank you in advance

@n8henrie same here... fan turns on and off constantly in idle

Last edited by kschwarz (2014-04-27 00:57:13)

kirkpuppy · 2014-04-27 01:58:02

@nariox: I did try the advice in the wiki for suspend, but it actually made suspend hang for me. Might give 3.13.x a go though. It would be nice to have suspend to work, it takes 10-11 seconds for the firmware to load grub and then another 11-12 seconds to get to a desktop. Think we're fighting bad firmware, too bad, the hardware is quite nice. Picked this c720 up a week or so ago from bestbuy for $99 after trading in a really old laptop that had XP on it.

nariox · 2014-04-27 02:59:16

kirkpuppy wrote:

@nariox: I did try the advice in the wiki for suspend, but it actually made suspend hang for me. Might give 3.13.x a go though. It would be nice to have suspend to work, it takes 10-11 seconds for the firmware to load grub and then another 11-12 seconds to get to a desktop. Think we're fighting bad firmware, too bad, the hardware is quite nice. Picked this c720 up a week or so ago from bestbuy for $99 after trading in a really old laptop that had XP on it.

Aww man, I wish I had a laptop running XP ):
You can reduce the time by setting the gbb flags. It's not pretty, but I boot very quickly.

@kschwarz: I haven't seen anyone using the sensors, the only thing I've seen for this is one that uses the webcam. I'm not even sure there's a driver in mainline for the light sensor.

kirkpuppy · 2014-04-27 03:30:33

Ya, it was an old piece of computer, 32bit cpu, 512mb ram, battery would last about 1 minute . I did set "set_gbb_flags.sh 0×489", are there other gbb flags to set? I'd really like to get rid of the white screen that says to hit the space bar to re-enable secure mode.

Last edited by kirkpuppy (2014-04-27 03:34:00)

nariox · 2014-04-27 04:02:55

kirkpuppy wrote:

Ya, it was an old piece of computer, 32bit cpu, 512mb ram, battery would last about 1 minute . I did set "set_gbb_flags.sh 0×489", are there other gbb flags to set? I'd really like to get rid of the white screen that says to hit the space bar to re-enable secure mode.

Funny that you say it takes over 10 secs. I'm booting to a full gnome desktop in about 10 secs (I'm using a few tricks, btrfs+lzo, upgraded SSD etc). What init does Fatdog use?

kirkpuppy · 2014-04-27 12:18:57

nariox wrote:

Funny that you say it takes over 10 secs. I'm booting to a full gnome desktop in about 10 secs (I'm using a few tricks, btrfs+lzo, upgraded SSD etc). What init does Fatdog use?

It takes 10-11 seconds from pressing the power button until grub loads. Then Fatdog takes 11-12 seconds. Fatdog64's filesystem is a compressed squashfs file, that get loaded into ram. I cut it down to about 200MB for the c720, normally about 237MB. So that takes a couple seconds to load, the rest of the time is the kernel probing hardware and udev loading modules (~6 seconds), Fatdog64's scripts setting up the filesystems, networking, etc. (~ 2 seconds) and Xorg starting (~2 seconds). There's some overlap in those times due to some things happening in parallel, but that's roughly what happens. With a normal Linux hard drive install to a SSD the boot times should be quite fast. I don't want to derail the thread too much though. Is it taking ~10 seconds for your c720's firmware to load your boot loader? Did you set any other gbb flags?

kschwarz · 2014-04-27 12:50:15

@nariox I thought Yannick@ekiga has found out as he tells in post 53 I do not get how to do this kernel stuff and as I am a real noob I don't want to ruin my system while trying.

Next thing is post 160 The touchpad "patch" by kirkpuppy I would love to try this on my acer but as mentioned above... can anyone please explain how its done?

Last edited by kschwarz (2014-04-27 12:52:14)

therealarchdaemon · 2014-04-27 18:56:39

kschwarz wrote:

@nariox I thought Yannick@ekiga has found out as he tells in post 53 I do not get how to do this kernel stuff and as I am a real noob I don't want to ruin my system while trying.
Next thing is post 160 The touchpad "patch" by kirkpuppy I would love to try this on my acer but as mentioned above... can anyone please explain how its done?

You should start by reading this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … _Patchsets

Basically, you take the PKGBUILD for the kernel, which you can get from ABS, and then you modify it to apply whatever custom patches you want before it builds the kernel. You can look at the differences between the PKGBUILD of the stock Arch kernel and the PKGBUILD of one of the patched kernels in the AUR to give you a hint on how to apply the patches.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that. Because you're just patching modules, you should just be able to modify the script in the wiki to patch and build only those modules. It shouldn't be too hard to do with a little experimentation.

Last edited by therealarchdaemon (2014-04-27 19:07:51)

kirkpuppy · 2014-04-27 23:06:23

kschwarz wrote:

Next thing is post 160 The touchpad "patch" by kirkpuppy I would love to try this on my acer but as mentioned above... can anyone please explain how its done?

I've uploaded the patched source here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/source … 720.tar.xz

For a "generic" Linux disto you would need to have development libraries installed for xorg-server and gcc. Then open a terminal wherever you put the tarball:

tar -xJf xf86-input-synaptics-1.7.4-c720.tar.xz # (This uncompresses the source tar ball.)

cd xf86-input-synaptics-1.7.4 # (Then enter that directory)

configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 # (This could be different for Arch, I'm quite sure the --prefix=/usr is right, but --libdir=/usr/lib64 is only for 64bit and then only on some distros. For 32bit you can usually just omit that.)
make # (This compiles the source)

make install # (This installs the new driver.)

After that restart Xorg then open a terminal and type:

synclient AreaBottomEdge=400

That should do it. You should be able to add AreaBottomEdge=400 to ./xorg.conf/50-synaptics.conf. And then it should work on next boot, but for some reason I had add synclient AreaBottomEdge=400 to a script that runs after Xorg starts, but that wonky-ness could be unique to me.

I just saw therealarchdaemon post so it's probably easier just to do that .

kschwarz · 2014-04-27 23:20:35

Oh thank you guys so much I really appreciate that

@kirkpuppy It worked very well on my system thank you so much this also could be something for the Wiki Page

Last edited by kschwarz (2014-04-28 00:05:24)

dhead · 2014-04-28 09:34:27

Hi guys.

I'm considering to get the 4GB model to replace both my Samsung Chromebook and my old laptop (which is slower than the C720) that currently dual booting Arch and Windows.

I would need to have Windows running on a VM, can anyone confirm VT-x isn't disabled by the firmware (cat /proc/cpuinfo) ?

I was thinking to replace the ssd with Crucial M500 120GB mSATA, any reason why this model won't work ? Edit: oh.. I need a M.2 SSD, not so much variety on Amazon.

Last edited by dhead (2014-04-28 09:48:38)

kschwarz · 2014-04-28 20:54:31

@dhead The Crucial one is definitely not working as it is to big search for the MyDigitalSSD SC2 Super Cache 2 42mm SATA III 6G M.2 NGFF M2 SSD Solid State Drive I can confirm that this one fit.

connor.brks · 2014-04-29 00:38:46

If anybody is having problems with the touchpad not working when the chromebook isn't grounded, add the following to your 50-synaptics.conf file:

 synclient HorizHysteresis=12
 synclient VertHysteresis=12

I found it on a site for the same problem on the Acer C7.

On a side note, is anybody else experiencing problems with wifi? I've followed all the intructions on the wiki, and everything works amazingly, minus the fact that every now and then wifi decides to not authenticate or connect with anything, open, wep, or WPA. It normally happens when I do a systemctl enable NetworkManager. I've got to disable NetworkManger and manually connect to wifi networks using wpa_supplicant when this happens, then it works... sometimes... if I'm lucky.

Edit: I'll be more specific. When this problem occurs, wpa_supplicant constantly tries to autheticate with the access point, constantly spewing out:

wlp1s0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED 
wlp1s0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED 
wlp1s0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED

Any suggestions welcome, my chromebook is my only machine and instability is something I don't need when I have a sheadload of college work I should be doing.

Edit 2:
Okay, seems like I've rectified the problem by blacklisting ath3k

Last edited by connor.brks (2014-04-29 13:41:59)

Arch Linux

#151 2014-04-21 06:45:08

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#152 2014-04-21 12:43:04

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#153 2014-04-21 14:44:08

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#154 2014-04-21 22:22:53

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#155 2014-04-21 23:52:37

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#156 2014-04-22 00:39:55

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#157 2014-04-22 21:48:33

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#158 2014-04-24 01:26:20

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#159 2014-04-24 01:43:11

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#160 2014-04-26 14:21:33

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#161 2014-04-26 23:01:04

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#162 2014-04-27 00:38:20

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#163 2014-04-27 00:46:43

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#164 2014-04-27 01:58:02

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#165 2014-04-27 02:59:16

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#166 2014-04-27 03:30:33

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#167 2014-04-27 04:02:55

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#168 2014-04-27 12:18:57

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#169 2014-04-27 12:50:15

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#170 2014-04-27 18:56:39

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#171 2014-04-27 23:06:23

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#172 2014-04-27 23:20:35

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#173 2014-04-28 09:34:27

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#174 2014-04-28 20:54:31

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

#175 2014-04-29 00:38:46

Re: Acer C720/C720P Chromebook

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