Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

Barghest · 2009-01-06 21:21:26

snappy wrote:

My hd issue is ok now, I've it down to between 20-60 loads/hr which is fine by me. Thanks for the help. First time using arch and it's easily the best linux distro out there.

Nice, what did you do?

snappy · 2009-01-07 12:14:35

Barghest wrote:

Nice, what did you do?

I just went through this thread again from scratch and change a few settings in laptop-mode.conf that fwojciec posted with a couple of slight changes

LM_BATT_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=60

BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=128

It stilll sometimes has 80-90/hr so I'm trying to find what I'm running that could be causing that, but I'm not too worried either way now.

fwojciec · 2009-01-07 21:43:40

snappy wrote:

Barghest wrote:
Nice, what did you do?
I just went through this thread again from scratch and change a few settings in laptop-mode.conf that fwojciec posted with a couple of slight changes
LM_BATT_HD_IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=60
BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=128
It stilll sometimes has 80-90/hr so I'm trying to find what I'm running that could be causing that, but I'm not too worried either way now.

My harddrive seems to make two different kinds of actions which increase the cycle load count -- one of them makes a click sound, but the drive itself still spins, the other one stops the hd spinning. Assuming that you have the same hd as I do (Toshiba) BATT_HD_POWERMGMT setting of 128 is going to result in the first type of event (click) taking place after more of less 10 seconds; the other type of even seems to be associated with the IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS setting (in my case also set to 60) and happens later and independently of the click sound: at some stage the hd stops rotating.

With BATT_HD_POWERMGMT set to 240, for example, and IDLE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS still at 60 the two events happen at the same time, after 60 seconds (the drive clicks and immediately stops spinning).

In other words -- you could try setting BATT_HD_POWERMGMT to something higher and see if that helps with number of cycles per hour. I know that according to hdparm man page all hdparm -B settings above 127 shouldn't spin the drive down, but this doesn't seem to be the case with the hd in my nc10.

Last edited by fwojciec (2009-01-07 22:05:02)

snappy · 2009-01-08 11:32:33

I've got a Hitachi drive. It's just the click that increases the load cycle on mine.

The reason I put the BATT_HD_POWERMGNT too 128 was that I've read elsewhere that hdparm -B 128 is the safest for when on battery supply since there is more of a chance of falls and knocks and the higher load/unload is better.
Also when I was manually setting it with hdparm, a setting of 240 was no different on my drive to 254 from what I could tell.

weinem · 2009-01-09 23:25:25

Barghest wrote:

Hm, I didn't notice any issues with the screen/graphics.
Here's the xorg.conf I use:
[...]
I hope this helps you.

Many Thanks!
Maybe I'm the only one having problems to setup X11 on the NC10, but I do not get the touchpad working. I have the xf86-input-synaptics module installed and tested the xorg.conf file pasted above - without luck. It seems that additional steps are necessary.

With the xorg.conf from above, X11 complains that the module "record" (Load "record") is missing. How to get this installed?

A not mentioned but existing problem is the "xorg input hotplugging bug" which freezes all input devices:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xor … otplugging

and makes the following addition to xorg.conf necessary:

Section "ServerFlags"
     Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection

The NC10 wiki article doesn't provide any details about the necessary setup steps. So which guides or articles did you consult to get X11 running?

Many thanks & best regards,
Mark

Evoreth · 2009-01-10 11:56:45

I don't even have a xorg.conf, and everything works great.

weinem · 2009-01-10 12:37:45

I also got the impression that it works for most users out-of-the-box, so maybe I missed something to install or to configure. Is there something special to configure in /etc/rc.conf or elsewhere?

And apart from "pacman -S xorg" which additional steps did you make to install a perfectly working X11?

regards, Mark

fwojciec · 2009-01-19 23:12:52

Just a quick question -- how are you guys configuring the intel video card? I've noticed that with default settings redraw speed in terminal is simply *awful*, and video performance as a whole dramatically bad. This is what I came up with so far, and it seems to make things much more bearable, but I wonder if this is as good as it gets at this point in time (before we can use UXA acceleration, perhaps when the 2.6.0 intel driver hits the repos):

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "945GME"
  Driver  "intel"
  BusID   "PCI:0:2:0"
  Option  "DRI" "True"
  Option  "FrameBufferCompression"  "false"
  Option  "AccelMethod" "EXA" # or uxa|exa
  Option  "MigrationHeuristic"  "greedy"
  Option  "ExaNoComposite"  "True"
EndSection

I'm not using compositing, so it is disabled completely, btw.

Performance with these settings:

* glxgears (3D)

 > glxgears 
2217 frames in 5.0 seconds = 443.376 FPS
2077 frames in 5.0 seconds = 415.275 FPS
2225 frames in 5.0 seconds = 444.887 FPS
2091 frames in 5.0 seconds = 418.171 FPS
2183 frames in 5.0 seconds = 436.506 FPS

* gtkperf (2D)

> gtkperf 
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Mon Jan 19 18:08:20 2009

GtkEntry - time:  0.17
GtkComboBox - time:  2.49
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.00
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.47
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.34
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.55
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.33
GtkRadioButton - time:  1.18
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  3.64
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  0.81
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  2.59
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  5.92
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  5.65
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.44
 --- 
Total time: 26.57

Any ideas for further tweaking?

Last edited by fwojciec (2009-01-20 18:02:11)

fwojciec · 2009-01-20 01:43:05

Also, FYI, especially in case you're building your own kernel for NC10 -- this is a patch which enables rfkill functionality for the wifi card using ath5k driver and Fn-F9 key combination (complete with disabling led, etc.). I've only tried it very briefly, but it seems to work as advertised. It looks like it is not unlikely that this patch will be included in the kernel by default in the future. Anyways...

Link to the patch I used: http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~doto/ke … 01-08.diff
Link to the thread about it on the [ath5k-devel] mailing list: https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linu … 414/thread

Barghest · 2009-01-20 16:16:20

Thanks for the link to the patch. I think I'll wait for it to be included in the kernel though.

It seems that you not only have another HDD but also another graphics chipset. lspci shoes me a 945.

I'll try the suggestions made for it in the wiki.

fwojciec · 2009-01-20 18:03:44

Barghest wrote:

Thanks for the link to the patch. I think I'll wait for it to be included in the kernel though.
It seems that you not only have another HDD but also another graphics chipset. lspci shoes me a 945.
I'll try the suggestions made for it in the wiki.

The Intel video is 945GME, I don't know why I have something else set in xorg.conf, I must have copied it from somewhere and it stayed like this since...

john_schaf · 2009-01-20 22:18:21

About your rfkill patch -
Besides the led which is turned off, how different is it from doing a "ifconfig wmaster0 down" ?
Does that save some more power ?

cheers

fwojciec · 2009-01-20 22:25:28

john_schaf wrote:

About your rfkill patch -
Besides the led which is turned off, how different is it from doing a "ifconfig wmaster0 down" ?
Does that save some more power ?
cheers

I don't think so -- as far as I can tell, when using ath5k module bringing the interface down is completely sufficient to stop the wifi card from drawing any energy. The patch is mostly an aesthetic thing, but it's nice

fwojciec · 2009-01-22 00:16:51

One more update -- hopefully someone will find it useful

I got 1024x600 framebuffer working with intelfb and grub2-915resolution from AUR. The installation is actually pretty straight forward. Here is my grub2 menu entry for Arch for reference:

# (0) Arch Linux
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
set root=(hd0,3)
insmod 915resolution
915resolution 5c 1024 600
linux /vmlinuz26-buka root=/dev/sda6 resume=/dev/sda5 video=intelfb vga=604 loglevel=0 quiet ro
}

All stuff required to get the correct framebuffer resolution is in bold. I'm using a custom kernel (thus no initrd image), but I don't see how this would make a difference as far as being able to get it to work is concerned.

karlyzo · 2009-01-31 13:25:22

Hi
Can anyone of you guys report a similar experience with the nc10?
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=63045
This is really important! If this is a common issue with no easy workaround, linux is more or less useless on the nc10.

fwojciec · 2009-01-31 13:35:58

karlyzo wrote:

Hi
Can anyone of you guys report a similar experience with the nc10?

Not me.

john_schaf · 2009-01-31 16:27:19

karlyzo wrote:

Hi
Can anyone of you guys report a similar experience with the nc10?
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=63045

Never had such a problem.

karlyzo · 2009-02-02 13:51:46

Ok, I just forgot to unblacklist video... sorry about the trouble. This was an attempt to get the backlight-fn-kombination back to live. This quirk works on my dell inspiron 1520, so I tried it here, too. But, alas...

I've also tried to activate 915resolution and intelfb. Just install grub2-915resolution, copy and adjust fwojciec's code to your harddrive. (And properly adjust your hds since grub2 now counts starting from 1)
Furthermore, due to my previous installation of xf86-video-intel-newest I activated the UXA|EXA as shown by fwojciec. (Well, how can I find out, which accel. I'm actually using?)
Check yourself:

glxgears
2314 frames in 5.0 seconds = 462.647 FPS
2320 frames in 5.0 seconds = 463.996 FPS
2358 frames in 5.0 seconds = 471.430 FPS
2370 frames in 5.0 seconds = 473.847 FPS
2375 frames in 5.0 seconds = 474.956 FPS
2328 frames in 5.0 seconds = 465.407 FPS
2305 frames in 5.0 seconds = 460.968 FPS
2342 frames in 5.0 seconds = 468.337 FPS

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Mon Feb  2 14:39:02 2009

GtkEntry - time:  0.12
GtkComboBox - time:  3.11
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.53
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.69
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.56
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.75
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.47
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.61
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  1.15
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  0.86
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  2.43
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  3.92
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  5.15
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.41
 --- 
Total time: 22.79

oswaldkelso · 2009-02-03 09:13:07

Hi. Has anyone used the setting from the acer one xorg.conf? I'm on lenny and getting well over 600fps with glxgears

ok@debian1600:~$ glxgears
3093 frames in 5.0 seconds = 618.545 FPS
3076 frames in 5.0 seconds = 615.191 FPS
3082 frames in 5.0 seconds = 616.210 FPS
3080 frames in 5.0 seconds = 615.864 FPS
3080 frames in 5.0 seconds = 615.894 FPS

I do have 2gb of ram and don't know if it has any bearing?

The only bits I've changed in my xorg.conf are below

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "NoDDC"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
DisplaySize 195 113
EndSection

hope it helps.

Last edited by oswaldkelso (2009-02-03 09:14:12)

nightwatch · 2009-02-05 08:46:40

I'm having issues with suspend on my NC10 that arrived yesterday. It may be that they revised some hardware or the BIOS, because I haven't found anybody with this issue so far.

Essentially, the kernel hangs somewhere during resume. Suspend-to-RAM works fine both in pm-utils and when booting manually from the initramfs, but resume always fails. The hard drive light blinks for a second, indicating that the kernel has received control, but it then hangs shortly thereafter.

I tried the pm_trace trick and the RTC isn't even updated. It must be a very early crash...

Edit: Will try downgrading to 2.6.27 and posting the results here.

Last edited by nightwatch (2009-02-05 08:47:46)

fwojciec · 2009-02-05 09:47:54

I had a problem like this at first, and I had to use one of the quirks when suspending (don't remember which quirk, I think the dpms one) -- hibernate always worked fine. I think it went away when I updated bios, but I can't be sure this was what fixed it.

It should work without any problems, in either case.

nightwatch · 2009-02-07 02:26:46

Updating the BIOS didn't fix it. However, downgrading to 2.6.27.2 did fix it. Suspend and resume now works just fine.

Someone less lazy than I should triage this.

Mogger · 2009-02-07 14:08:07

Now I'm finally a member of the groups "proud NC10 owners" and "proud Arch users".

Got my white netbook yesterday, and installed Arch on it. I'm a Slackware user so I felt comfortable with the text installer. Whenever in doubt, I had the wiki at hand, so there were no big problems with the installation.

Configuring Xorg, however, wasn't as straightforward, I had lots of issues with the keyboard. Turns out it was due to the xorg input hotplugging, which is very well described here. Now the keyboard works as expected, although I haven't fixed my custom Dvorak-layout yet (it doesn't hurt to practice QWERTY from time to time so I don't forget it!).

KDM appeared to be broken at first (the left and screen edges looked strange), but I fixed it by changing theme. Guess I'll make a custom theme sometime.

I haven't tried suspend and hibernate yet. Other things I have yet to fix include:
- Screen brightness with PowerDevil (I use xbacklight right now)
- Touchpad, haven't tweaked the settings yet
- Make it easy to toggle bluetooth and wireless on/off
- Make yakuake appear faster (currently it "flashes" which is a bit annoying)
... Remove those ugly stickers.

Oh! And upgrade the memory.

My current system is only a playground, I'm going to do a proper installation with ext4 instead of 3. Yeah I know that you can convert, but it seems much easier to do it directly in the installer. Remember, I'm a slacker.

Anyway. I just wanted to post my progress so far. If anyone has any tips, it would be great. Otherwise I'll just continue to dig my way around.

fwojciec · 2009-02-07 14:34:50

Good news!

The new (2.6.28.4) kernel includes a fix for the fn keys issue. I just compiled it without the patch I used before and all fn keys work as they should.

john_schaf · 2009-02-07 15:42:25

Mogger wrote:

- Make it easy to toggle bluetooth and wireless on/off

I wrote a small script, which is bound to the Fn+F9 key using xbindkeys (actually Win+F9 until the latest kernel hits core), and it works as I want to switch on/off the wireless (I don't use blutetooth yet, so it stays off). It uses netcfg
Here it is, hope you find it usefull.

#!/bin/bash

stat=`ifconfig |grep "wmaster0"`

if [ "$stat" ]
then
#  echo "switching wifi off"
  notify-send -t 1000 "wifi off"
  sudo netcfg all-suspend
  sudo ifconfig wmaster0 down
# also swith bluetooth off ...
  hciconfig hci0 down ; rmmod hci_usb
else
#  echo "switching wifi on"
  notify-send -t 1000 "wifi on"
  sudo netcfg all-resume
fi

Arch Linux

#76 2009-01-06 21:21:26

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#77 2009-01-07 12:14:35

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#78 2009-01-07 21:43:40

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#79 2009-01-08 11:32:33

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#80 2009-01-09 23:25:25

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#81 2009-01-10 11:56:45

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#82 2009-01-10 12:37:45

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#83 2009-01-19 23:12:52

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#84 2009-01-20 01:43:05

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#85 2009-01-20 16:16:20

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#86 2009-01-20 18:03:44

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#87 2009-01-20 22:18:21

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#88 2009-01-20 22:25:28

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#89 2009-01-22 00:16:51

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#90 2009-01-31 13:25:22

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#91 2009-01-31 13:35:58

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#92 2009-01-31 16:27:19

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#93 2009-02-02 13:51:46

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#94 2009-02-03 09:13:07

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#95 2009-02-05 08:46:40

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#96 2009-02-05 09:47:54

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#97 2009-02-07 02:26:46

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#98 2009-02-07 14:08:07

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#99 2009-02-07 14:34:50

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

#100 2009-02-07 15:42:25

Re: Arch on Samsung NC10 ?

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