Linux On My Samsung

hello,
I have just bought the new 13" ultrabook made by samsung.
I've installed ubuntu 12.04 despite problems for the bios to detect usb hdd on boot !

Fn fonctions work properly out of the box except the fan control, and the keyboard backlit.
Keyboard can't even light up on the machine.

The biggest problem is about suspend/resume.
If it seems that suspend is ok, the ultrabook can't resume at all ! It shows a dark screen and the keyboard does not respond at all. hard reboot is needed.
Sometimes booting up results in caps lock blinking and results in a hard reboot as well.

I've tried the 3.4 kernel provided by cannonical 's ppa but the result is the same.
I've tried the 3.5 rc3 kernel from kernel.org and resume works perfectly.
I've filled a bug report on launchpad for that.

I have tried your ppa as well (voria) and it results in having the fan fn key to work but not the keyboard backlit.

Maybe anyone has suggestions to make in order to get a full compatibility between that very nice laptop and our lovely distribution ;-)

Thank's

Something else I would like to tweak is the screen backlight which is too strong by default. I would like to set it up to 50 % but don't know how to do it.

eric

hello obrowny

I just bought this very nice ultrabook too.
I had the same problem with the suspend function but it seems that if you press the Fn contract key (Fn+F2) the screen will display after resume !
It works for me.

So for me, only the backlight keyboard and the Fan Fn key aren't working as I do not try Voria's ppa as well.
By the way, I'm really impressed how a such recent laptop work very with Ubuntu with quiet no problem !

You are right ! fn+f2 and fn+f3 is working well !!! very strange.
But in kernel 3.2 at least 64 bits samsung module is missing so you can't actiate keyboard backlight.
In 3.4 and 3.5 kernels, you can activate the backlight with :

sudo echo 4 > /sys/devices/platform/samsung/leds/samsung::kbd_backlight/brightness

you can use echo from 1 to 8 to tune the power of the backlight but then you won't be able to use keyboard shortcuts.
When you are satisfied with your tuning (4 is ok for me) then you need to type :

sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

and add the command before exit 0
then your laptop will reboot with the keyboard lighted up.

Note that fan control works with kernel 3.4 and voria's ppa.