Linux On My Samsung

Hi folks,

I am new to the world of Samsung netbooks, and as I like to do the hard things, I decided to install gentoo (my favourite) on my brand new (yesterday acquired) N510.
As I will go on with the installation, I will post tricks, findings or problems, especially if they differ from NC10 (and I fear they will).

By now nothing special, after a first boot of Windows and finishing of installation and after creating the recovery point (just in case I never get running linux), I put the minimal install CD of gentoo on a USB stick and rebooted. fdisk is your friend, I erased the two Widnows partitions (leaving the "small" recovery partition - 7GB are small nowadays?) and followed the gentoo installation guide. Yesterday I arrived at the download of the system files and portage tree, now I'm at work. This evening I will have fun in configuring the kernel.

If you have any suggestions for kernel configuration (2.6.31-r6 if I remember well), feel welcome.

See you here

OK, the first obstacles have been resolved and I have a nice text-mode system by now:

1) Network
lspci lists a Marvell 88E8040 as PCI-E Fast Ethernet adapter. This is diriven by the sky2 driver, to be activated in kernel config:
Device Drivers -> Network Device support -> Ethernet 1000MBit -> Syskonnect Yukon2

The funny thing is that the specs of N510 said that it's a 100MBit device and that the names do not match at all. Have no opportunity to test 1000MBit by now, as my switch is only 100MBit. But it works.

2) CPU Freq scaling
Follow the acpi guide of gentoo for these settings. Shortly: Use the ondemand governor.

More to come...

First of all I have to correct a typo: The current gentoo kernel is linux-2.6.30-gentoo-r6.

Well, I went on a huge step. I decided to install KDE 4.2, thoug marked still unstable for x86 in gentoo. I followed this guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/k ... -guide.xml

Hence I had to copy the kde4.2.keywords file from gentoo to /usr/portage/package.keywords.

The relevant use flags in /etc/make.conf I have set:
acpi hal dbus X lm_sensors nvidia mysql svg opengl webkit -gtk -gnome qt3 qt4 kde alsa mng laptop avahi zeroconf mdnsresponder-compat

And the CFLAGS I use:
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -mtune=generic -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -mtune=generic -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

A first try to emerge kde-meta:4.2 resulted in missing dependencies, there are some packages missing in the package.keywords file provided by gentoo:

=app-admin/eselect-python-20090824
=app-arch/xz-utils-4.999.9_beta

After adding the above lines, "emerge -pv kde-meta:4.2" reports everything nice. Hence we start compiling (remove the "p" from the command), and be patient!
(As I have at home other gentoo boxes, I have enabled distcc, and if you have the same I recommend you to make it work before compiling kde... See this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml for details.)

Next step will be to make work nvidia ion driver and the synaptics touchpad, stay tuned.

Hi,
first of all welcome to the forum!

Your gentoo installation "chronicles" are interesting, thanks for sharing with us.

I'm curious and I have to ask: what do you think about the Samsung N510, overall speaking?
It's a netbook that caught my attention, mainly because of the nvidia ion, but I'm wondering if it's worth its price.

Well, actually I did not use it really yet, I am still stuck with installation (and I did not play around with windows, just wiped it away ).

But I think for who does not need high CPU performance, its a good compromise and the display is surely useable also for longer sessions. KDE 4.2 looks good and feels fast (ion is definitely a plus). I cannot say yet what battery lifetime is about...
I still have to test a bunch of other features (bluetooth, hdmi output, card reader, webcam). I assume that these are equal to the NC10?

BTW currently I am having a hard time finding the right settings for the touchpad: horizontal and vertical edge scrolling works, but tapping does not. Do you have some example fdi for hal from the NC10? Are they the same?
And I am quite worried that display brightness cannot be changed dynamically because of missing features of the nvidia driver, but I am still investigating this...
I also still have to configure the function keys...

By now: I think it's worth the bucks I paid (499 €), mainly for the display and ion.

OK, besides of my work and private life I had little time to go ahead.
Anyway, just to continue:
It seems, that nvidia ION chipsets currently are not fully supported as far as /proc/acpi/video settings is concerned (the dir is always empty). I am not sure, who should add this support: some linux kernel driver or the nvidia driver itself (but he is complaining on X startup that there are settings missing in this dir, so I doubt this).
I have running KDE 4.2 with acceleration from the nvidia driver from portage tree. If you are a Gentoo user:
Please do not try to install the nvidia package itself, as this will break your kde installation (I had to do a revdep-rebuild after re-installing the gentoo nvidia-drivers package in order to get rid of it).

Stay tuned (but be patient)

I went some step ahead. I do not post detailed configuration info yet, because it's still work in progress. Anyway, here the good news:

- With the new XServer 1.6 (part of gentoo stable now), suspend to RAM works fine, it seems. Please follow the upgrade guides (read the news with "eselect news read new" after portage sync), otherwise your system may stop working. Suspends also on lid close (after some second)
- Sound works fine, as well as the webcam and the integrated Mic. But I still have some volume problems (I think the amplifier volume is out of sight for linux, but the "software" volumes of the single channels work fine), still to be investigated.
- Bluetooth seems to work, but I did not have the patience to configure and establish a real connection to my Nokia.
- The touchpad works fine (side edge scrolling works), though multi-touch seems not to work, maybe some configuration problem. Important: You need evdev driver from x86 as well as the synaptics driver and you need to create the right config for hal (I will post some later on, basically the same as for NC10).

Unfortunately Samsung stopped distribution of the N510 until Windows 7 is out, so I feel quite alone with my linux trials...

I've installed ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix on my N510 with mostly the same results as you (pretty much everything works except the brightness control). Here's hoping Nvidia get round to sorting this out soon!

I'm not entirely sure how, but I can now alter the brightness. The Fn keys don't work, but the gnome applet is able to control it with no problems at all. I'm using the video driver direct from Nvidia (version 185.18.36) rather than the version through apt. My kernel is the latest stock jaunty kernel (2.6.28-16).

I only noticed this yesterday when I unplugged the power as I was suspending the laptop, and gnome-power-manager auto-dimmed the screen. When I turned it back on, I saw that /proc/acpi/video is no longer empty, and everything works.

After it's out, I will give a try to the Ubuntu 9.10 live CD, just to see what works and which modules are loaded.

BTW, did you manage the volume control to get working through FN keys? Does this work out of the box with jaunty?

jay wrote:BTW, did you manage the volume control to get working through FN keys? Does this work out of the box with jaunty?

The volume control via Fn keys worked out of the box with 9.04. To get the Fn keys to control the brightness, see my post here: http://www.sammynetbook.com/plugins/for ... .php?37333. It's not difficult at all, as it turns out.

hi there...

I've managed to get x86_64 Gentoo install on this netbook. Everything works, but:
- tap on touchpad, only touchpad buttons can be used
- dri isn't working
- internal micrphone isn't working
Video driver is openchrome. Kernel is 2.6.31. I'll try to get dri working later. Even webcam works.

denisjhon wrote:Video driver is openchrome.

Really? That's a driver for VIA chipsets, and the n510 is Nvidia. You probably won't have much success without the proprietary Nvidia driver. As for the microphone, are you sure it's not working? Check the mixer levels to make sure the volume isn't just all the way down.

Jim

Hi denisjhon,

welcome on gentoo board then ;-). One curiosity: can you please check, if on your install /proc/acpi/video contains some files and if so what they contain? And another question: why did you choose 64Bit? I thought, the Atom N280 does not support it It's true also that gentoo developers are concentrated a bit more on the amd64 version, but tecnically I see no reason to use it on such a "small" machine. I would suspect also, that memory consumption will be significantly higher with 64Bit, or am I wrong?

And of course jimr is right, you should use the nvidia driver for the N510 in order to get acceleration.

I've also seen that Samsung (re-)launched the N510 in Germany, so hopefully user base (and hence linux users) will increase faster and the remaining small problems will be solved.

Whilst preparing me to setup a virtualbox for windows in order to unpack the new BIOS Samsung released for the N510 (hopefully addresses the same BIOS issues as for the NC10, that is the backlight ACPI functions), gentoo developers went stable with KDE4.3. While this is good news for the guys that kept 3.5.x and waited with patience, I had to spend a lot of time to get rid of the slightly newer unstable version I installed (4.3.2 vs. 4.3.1).

There is also an unstable ebuild for the latest nvidia driver 190.48, but the relative nvidia-settings won't compile without a little hack I will post later...