Less Linux Laptop Woes.

If the WordPress stats of this blog are even a tiny bit correct, a considerable portion of my few visitors stumble upon this site after googling (or something similar) for ‘MSI PR200′ and ‘Linux’.

Now I don’t really expect all of these visitors to find what they are looking for here, but for some strange reason I do feel some sort of an obligation to at least try and post some kind of update on the issues I have been dealing with.

So, let’s recap first. What were those issues again?
Well, there was a small quirk with alsa not muting the speakers when on headphones. The power management was all screwed up, causing the battery state to be wrong about 90 percent of the time. And finally, both suspend (S3) and hibernate (S4) did not work.

The alsa issue was easily fixed by adding a certain line to the /etc/modprobe file. At least that’s what I think was needed, unless I’ve misinterpreted what’s in the System76 driver.
On kernels up to 2.6.22, the battery issue could be fixed by using the ec_intr=0 boot option. As of 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 however, that option was no longer available, so we were back to were we started. (Which was also the reason why I stuck with Ubuntu 7.10 for a while.)
That same kernel bump also caused S3 and S4 suspend to break, which I had gotten to work thanks to the System76 driver on Ubuntu 7.10 (and some mysterious custom DSDT.aml file).

While I was sleeping…

The thing that amazed me the most, while I was ‘out of touch’ with what’s hot or not in the world of Linux, is how fast things evolve. Of course, being a Linux user and enthousiast for more than five years, I already knew this. Nevertheless, I was still pleasantly surprised.

To name a few:

- Linux kernel bump from 2.6.22 to almost 2.6.27
A few months ago I was still using kernel .22 (Although .24 was already released and widely in use, but I had to regress to .22 because of hardware isues). Right now I’m using Arch64’s stock 2.6.26 kernel, but I think we’re not far from seeing the release of .27, which by the way, is supposed to cure some of the acpi issues with my laptop even more. So hooray for that!

- Yet another distribution release frenzy is about to happen
Yes, it’s time for another biannual distro release frenzy, with new versions of Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora about to be released, either this month or the next. This is usually good for a string of “Best release ever” and “Linux is finally ready for the desktop” shouting on Linux forums, blogs and IRC channels. And I think it also helps in attracting new users to make the transition from Windows. So, that’s a good thing. Right?

But still, it kind of annoys me as well. Being accustomed to a rolling release cycle (first with Debian Testing, and now with Arch), I sometimes just don’t get what all the fuss is about. But that’s just me, I guess.

Oh yeah, before I forget. Debian is also about to release Lenny. They are even already fashionably late with release (Debian wouldn’t be Debian without a release delay.). I haven’t really noticed a big frenzy about Lenny’s release. Which is a petty because, in my opinion, this a much bigger ‘thing’ than any new Suse or Ubuntu.

- Tint ressurection!
I’ve always found the old Tint (ttm) to be the ideal task list to go with a lightweight window manager like Openbox. Unfortunately, the project died quite a while ago. Although it was still available in an unmaintained last version, I did end up switching to PyPanel in the end. But now someone (Cengztr) was finally brave enough to continue working on this incredible task ‘manager’! The new Tint2 has been cleaned up and was added with some new features. Basically though, it is still as awesome as before.

- Rubyripper made it to the official repo’s.
Of Arch Linux that is. I don’t think you’ll find it in Debian’s or Ubuntu’s. So for Arch users, it just moved from the AUR to the community repositories. Not really big news, but pleasing nevertheless.

All of this is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg…

Dualbooting, a waste of disc space.

Well, in my case, it was.

I had Ubuntu Hardy and Arch Linux on my laptop for a few weeks, but due to the powermanagement problems on 2.6.24 kernels (and above), I hardly ever booted into the Arch install. I know Ubuntu 8.04 also has a 2.6.24 kernel, but I was using a workaround on it that partially solved the battery issue with my laptop (thanks to pavel_987 and badbull).

Still, it lacked the support for suspend and hibernation, and the workaround was causing some strange battery errors, when unplugging from AC power.

The brave/smart/best/ideal thing to do was to actively try and work on a solution myself. But alas, I took the lazy route and did a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10, in which hibernation at least works and the battery state is read correctly.

Meanwhile, the good people of System76 are still working on a solution for both the battery and the suspend/hibernate issues. It’s proven to be a tough nut to crack. But since I’m not really one of their customers (they don’t ship outside the U.S. and Canada), I’m not really in a position to complain about it.

Again, I promise to keep following up on this issues and I’ll do my best to post updates on my blog as soon as possible.

Format C:

Despite the slight issues I have experienced with any Linux distro on my laptop, I decided it was about time to finally wave goodbye to Windows Vista. Even with the acpi problems, I still preferred booting into Linux over Vista.
Plus it takes up a huge amount of hard disc space. Seriously, 20 GB for an OS install, is that really necessary?

So it’s gone. Free again at last! Free at last!

I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64 instead, mainly to test and monitor the patches and fixes System76 will release to resolve the battery and suspend issues on the daru2 models.
I’m probably not Ubuntu’s biggest fan, as I think it’s way too bloated out-of-the-box and because it’s tendency to avoid the command line almost at all cost annoys the hell out of me. But I have to admit that, if you have fast enough hardware, it is a great distribution for any Linux newcomer.

Nevertheless, I want to switch back to Arch as fast as possible. Therefore, I’m going to dualboot it with Ubuntu for as long as I’m having these issues. This will give me the chance to thoroughly test the patches/fixes/workarounds (whatever you want to call it), and at the same time I’ll be able to try and port them to my Arch install.

The laptop has a 250 GB hard drive, which is roughly 235 GB in reality. So what I did was create a 200 GB logical partition at the end of the drive for all my important data (music, school stuff, films, and so on). Then I added a 4.1 GB Swap partition. And finally I evenly split the rest of the free space between Ubuntu and Arch, so about 14 GB each.
Unfortunately I still lose 1000 MB on that silly Vista rescue partition, but I don’t want to remove this because I’m afraid I’d lose my warranty (or they’d at least be a bit upset about it) if I ever have to send it back for repairs.

I’ve already installed the full bloat of an Ubuntu Gnome desktop, so now I’m about to add a lightweight Arch + Openbox setup to it.

The System76 driver … again.

Again I know, but it’s just one of the most pressing linux-related issues I’m dealing with at the moment. And it probably won’t be the last blog post about it.

Anyway..

I did some further testing with the driver on Ubuntu Gutsy, followed up on the important topics on the Ubuntu Forums, and I learned a few more things:

As Jose commented correctly, suspend works, but only to a certain degree. I had set up the laptop to suspend automatically when the laptop lid was closed, and it did, but sometimes it wouldn’t wake up afterwards. Other times it would wake up, but when I wanted to shutdown later on, it hung. Forcing me to shut it down “the windows way” (keeping the power button pressed for ten seconds until it died).

The sound is indeed a bit flakey, but once you know how to handle it, the workaround is simple. When using a headphone jack, you basically have to make sure the front speakers are muted and the headphone switch is ticked on in the Gnome Volume Controls. This isn’t really a big problem as long as you use Gnome to control the volume, or something similar. I don’t know how I’m going to handle it when I set up Openbox, but if necessary I’ll just load up a small part of Gnome to get it working.

So apart from that, on Gutsy, the rest worked pretty well.

Alas, that is not all…

I might go back to Ubuntu.

Yes you read it right, not entirely out of free will though.

In short, my laptop has some serious power management issues; If I understood correctly, the kernel continually receives interrupts from the battery, which somehow confuses it. This results in the OS never really knowing the state of the battery, or whether or not it’s running on AC power or on battery.
Sometimes the info displayed in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state is correct for like 5 seconds, but most of the time it isn’t. Causing warnings of low battery, dimming and undimming of the screen, etcetera. All very annoying things.

Additionally, suspend and hibernate don’t work either. And it being a small laptop, intented for dragging along almost everywhere I go, it’s kind of essential that I manage to get that working properly.

So why would Ubuntu provide a solution that isn’t possible under Arch Linux ?

Dutch Arch Forums.

Heyhow, I’m a moderator at a Linux forum!

Torsten contacted me last week, wondering if I might be interested in helping with setting up a Dutch forum for Arch Linux users. To our surprise there wasn’t one yet, and although most Dutch speaking people are fairly good at English, it’s still nice to have a Dutch forum.

So he arranged a domain and some hosting and we got it started.

This is not intended to be a competitor for the ‘official’ Arch community, with separate documentation or whatever. On the contrary, we just think it might be a good addition to it. Just like the Polish or German web sites.

So if you’re Dutch or Flemish (or maybe even South-African) go to http://arch-forum.nl, register and help us make it a nice place for Dutch speaking Arch users !

EDIT: Although in essence, we don’t really want to “split up” the communities documentation source (being, the wiki), we have decided to set up a separate wiki for Dutch-only documentation.
Why? Because the official wiki is (imho!) a real mess with all those different languages thrown together. For English documentation it is without a doubt THE best resource, for Dutch documentation (or for that matter any other language) it isn’t.

[HowTo] Configure Arch Linux.

When you’ve completed the base install of Arch Linux, there’s not really much to work with. Hell, you haven’t even got a regular user yet (only root). So there’s quite a lot that needs to be done and you’ll need to do it step by step. The biggest advantage is that you get to decide what you want, making your system completely adapted to your liking. Also, you’ll get to know your system much better. And last but not least, it’ll make it fast as hell, or at least, as fast as you want it to be…

This HowTo only covers some basic steps in your system configuration, which I find particularly useful or important. Getting your sound working, configuring pacman, installing and configuring the X-server and a desktop environment… etcetera.
If there’s something “bigger” or more special, like for instance setting up the Openbox window manager, I might write a separate HowTo on it later.