In order to replace my Palm Lifedrive, which was used as WiFi, Address-book and Wikipedia-Reader I bought a Lenovo netbook with Tablet Functions. Okay a different type of device, but I need no cell phone and traditional PDAs are gone 🙂
It was delivered to me practically to the release date of Kubuntu 10.10. This time it was not so smoothly as expected. Read the details:
Disclaimer
This page is nothing more than my personal experiences with my netbook . This is nothing official from any vendor! I am not responsible for anything you do with your hard- and software. For any support contact the respective vendors! Please respect the legal notice.
- Who should read the following description? The machine runs mostly “out-of-the-box”. All the rest is due to you. Be willing to learn, follow instructions form Ubuntu geeks, accept to fail and start again. At least you should know:
- How to operate apt or Adept Manager
- Read Readme-Files and HowTos
- Read Error-Messages and use search machines to find a solution
A good resource for hints, tips and questions is http://ubuntuforums.org/
Preparations
In Germany you can not buy this netbook without Windows 7. Again I had to pay „taxes“ for something I do not need. I still hope some market regulations will help customers in the future. The package comes without any media. Neither operating system, nor a recovery CD or DVD. There is a one key recovery function which needs some hard-disk space. As I do not need a thing called Windows at all, I kicked it from the hard-disk, but before I and made a backup of the complete hard disk using the Kubuntu Live CD.
Let’s go: Boot the laptop from Kubuntu Live CD, attach a external USB-hard-disk, open a shell e.g. by pressing Alt+F2 enter “konsole” and now you can use the dd-command for low-level backup. Just as example:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda | gzip --fast -c | \
split -d -b 650m - /media/disk/lenovo-s10-3t/sda_image.gz.
restore (hopefully) with somewhat like:
sudo cat /media/disk/lenovo-s10-3t/sda_image.gz.* | \
gunzip -c | sudo dd of=/dev/sda
Please! Do this on your own risk. Learn about dd in advance (Google is your friend). Be aware the whole process will some hours (in my case 4 hours), because there is a 250 GB storage to be processed at low-level. Finally on my USB-hard-disk it was about 48 GB backup data.
Installation of Kubuntu 10.10 „Maverick Meerkat“
In my notebook there is a Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz CPU, so I used the 64-bit (amd64) version of Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/download.php).
The desktop version of Maverick crashed all the time when it came to the disk partition screen, so I tried the alternate version, which worked. Also a try is to repair the MBR (Master Boot Record), boot the live CD and
sudo apt-get install mbr
sudo install-mbr /dev/sda
++ Graphics card — Intel GMA 4500M
XServer starts with the correct resolution and 3d support.
+ Power management — ACPI
Battery sensor works, lid close, screen power save and automatic shutdown on low energy level. Sadly just a few of the ACPI controlled key as described in paragraph Keyboard.
++ Suspend to ram
Works as designed, I do not know if really every device is up and running again after suspend but it seems so USB, network, no complains from my side.
++ Suspend to disk, hibernate
Works as designed, check suspend to ram. Honestly I have to say suspend to disk with 2 GB main memory is nearly as fast as boot from scratch 🙂
++ Touchpanel and -pad in keyboard
The „Cando Corporation Cando 10.1 Multi Touch Panel with Controller“ and „SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad“ are running. I did not played around with multi-touch, but seems to work.
I have been told there is an gravity control for the screen rotation, which currently does not work. A replacement could be a script assigned to a key like
rotate this is my version of the script in this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1415915
++ USB
No complains.
+ Keyboard
Keys like Brightness, Volume work. Other function keys not. Sadly some of them would be important such as WLAN. Also no key on the display frame works. They would be handy for screen rotate.
++ Network — LAN
The cable interface „Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)“ works.
+ Network — WLAN
Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)
You need the non free driver: System > Administration > Hardware Drivers works for me. If not follow the instructions as noticed in http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/README.txt
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source
To be honest, I missed the hardware switch at the right edge, here you switch the device on. Sadly my WPA secured connection with an old Netgear router does not work (with my other Kubuntu 10.10 hardware it works). One posting in the Ubuntu forums describes the same experience, I had no time to play and make it work.
+ Audio
Works as designed: „Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)“
To support headphone and microphone plug, add following lines
sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
options snd-hda-intel model="olpc-xo-1_5"
options snd-hda-intel model="ideapad"
++ SD/MMC card reader
My SD-cards are mounted, works.
++ Lenovo EasyCamera
I tried it with Skype, should be fine with other software as well.
Any hints?
Please send me any hints, new tips, report errors, etc. via e-mail werner@wernerroth.de. Please no support requests, thanks!
Links
Good starting points for Linux on Notebooks/Laptops are:
http://tuxmobil.de/
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/
