Update on AmiloPro with Ubuntu Linux #2

Ok, I’ve found the root causes for both major bugs I’ve posted about yesterday. Here they are:

• The “CPU soft lockup” hang: apparently this is caused by a bug in ipw3945 driver. An updated version has been released (1.1.3), and I hope it gets to distros fast, this bug has been reported over, and over on Launchpad, but there was very little info. If you don’t have the updated ipw3945 driver, the only solutions is have rf killswitch always disabled during boot, or to disable WiFi cars (either in BIOS or by blacklisting ipw3945 module)
• Random shutdowns: It has turned out the watchdog (iTCO_wdt) is to blame. I’ve submitted this bug and hope it gets solved. As a workaround you may blacklist iTCO_wdt module by doing ‘echo blacklist iTCO_wdt > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist’

That’s it. Neither of these issues have been fixed in Ubuntu yet, but it’s easily possible to work around them. Right now my laptop is working as reliably as it can.

Update: The new version of ipw3945 which is supposed to fix this nasty hang got into Feisty’s linux-image-2.6.20-2 which is ATM 2.6.20-rc2. If you’re willing to run a development kernel version, go ahead and get that package. Works for me :)

Update on AmiloPro 3505

Ok, so here’s the promised, biased review of AmiloPro 3505 with Ubuntu 6.10

It looks very nice. Even my sister, who is completely nuts about design admited she likes it. All mechanical components apear to work nicely, e.g. lid can be closed and opened or adjusted very easily. It doesn’t spring back when you release it, it just stays where you told it to. I’ve already managed to scratch the case a lot though, but that’s unavoidable.

Ubuntu seems to work nicely it does everything I need. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support all capabilities of AmiloPro. Here goes the list:

• CPU: Intel Core Duo 2×1.6GHz. Everything is very snappy, desktop is responsive even under heavy load and doing any sort of CPU-intensive work takes only a small part of time it used to take on my Mac Mini’s 1.42 GHz G4.
• Graphic card:It’s Intel GMA 945. It works fine under free driver, 3D acceleration and all the stuff. Of course this is a stripped down GPU, and such things as e.g. T&L are emulated in software, but it’s enough to run Beryl. Cool wobbly windows! People use to stare at my screen during lectures when they see it for first time.
• Touchpad: Marvelous! It’s more comforable than mouse! Everything works! Moving your finger near right edge makes it scroll, one finger tap=left click, two fingers tap=middle click, three finger tap=right click. Double tap+holding your finger on the pad lets me select text, make mouse gestures etc. It is well calibrated and just as sensitive as it needs to be.
• Sound card: Supported out-of-the-box. I can complain about quality though. The sound seems to be less rich and somehow flattened when compared to what I’m used to. The signal from headphone jack is too weak for my taste so I have to turn up volume to 100% to hear anything in areas where there is any significant noise. I don’t know if it’s a harware feature, or has something to do with ALSA configuration, but I guess it can be easily fixed by messing with asound.conf or such. I don’t know if microphone works, but I guess it should.
• Sleep: works. There are slight, occasional problem, for example it won’t go to sleep if I close the lid right after unplugging AC adapter. Also, on about 1/25 tries it’ll shut down right after waking up or boot normally, but this seems to be connected with some other issue that I’ll elaborate more on soon. It goes to sleep in ca. 10 sec and goes back in ca. 3 sec. so it’s really neat.
• Suspend (hibernate): appears to work, although I haven’t tested it much.
• Ethernet, HDD, DVD: They just work.

And now for something completely different. Things that don’t work:

• Wireless. It’s Intel wireless (ipw3945) so there’s free driver (with ugly binary blob but I don’t care that much about it), but unfortunately there stands a RF kill switch between me and enabling WiFi. It just a hardware measure that shuts down WiFi when needed (e.g. aboard a plane), but unfortunately the button to disable it doesn’t work at all.
  WiFi driver seems to crash kernel 2.6.17 ocasionally during boot sequence. It’s been reported on Ubuntu’s Malone many times, but I’ve yet to find a solution. I’ve disabled the WiFi card in BIOS, so it doesn’t happen any more. I’ll soon test it with newer kernel.
• SD/MMC card reader: ENE 712/4 no driver for it yet, I’ll just have to wait for it.

There are two nasty bugs that hit me bad, I’m not yet sure whether they are caused by hardware or software.

• The mentioned hang-on-boot bug. I get a “BUG: CPU soft lockup on CPU#0″ sometimes when I boot with WiFi enabled in BIOS. I’ll post if it changes with newer kernels.

• My laptop seems to shutdown ocassionaly, without any warning. This happens almost exlusively after waking it from sleep and I’ve yet to discover the cause of it. My two guesses:
  1. Since I’m spending a lot of time outdoors with laptop in my bag, it might get quite cold, and then, after resuming, some hardware sensor detects that temperature is out of range and shuts it down ASAP to prevent any possible damage
  2. Hardware watchdog gets activated unnecesary, and triggers shutdown if left without appropriate response.

  It seems to happen more often when I do something GPU-intensive, which would suggest that I’m either wrong in my suspicions, or 1) is the cause (e.g. sensors detect GPU is much hotter than the rest of laptop and decide something is very wrong with cooling).

There are some minor bugs that Ubuntu is “responsible” for, that I’m going to report to Malone soon.

• Powernowd doesn’t set scaling governor for second CPU core, which means that it works with 1.6GHz freq all the time sucking more power than it needs.
• -386 kernel flavour is installed and it doesn’t support SMP systems. Therefor if I want to use second core I need to manually install -generic kernel flavour instead.

That’s it. Apart from these bugs, everything works perfectly. This laptop really suits my needs, it can stay on battery for over 3.5h, and that means I can use it for two lectures straight without looking for power supply, it weights only 2.7kg, which is OK, unless I take a lot of books as well (I do have to take a lot of books with me usually, so I guess I’ll switch back to carrying backpack, rather than a bag).

Once these bugs get fixed I will recommend this laptop for any Ubuntero in need of a portable computer. It’s very neat, fast and goddamn useful.

Shiny new laptop

If you saw me today grining in some weird fashion that’s because I’ve finally put my hands on a shiny new laptop. By laptop I don’t meen the one I used to use, which often shut down when temperature in the room got above 25 centigrades Celcius. No, this one is a fresh, new Amilo Pro 3505 with many bells and whistles, and it’s all supposed to work well with Linux. Well, we’re just going to see about that, I’m getting Ubuntu’s 6.10 CD right now, so in just few minutes I’ll boot this thing and test it. Yeah!

I’ll post about it soon, and I hope I’ll post more often than I did lately.

*Leaves with a big sinister smile on his lips*

Update: The download stalled at The Numeber Of The Beast. Then I found out that Epiphany can’t handle download resuming very well. Well, this time it just didn’t bother. Darn.