Samsung series 9

Dear community members,

I have a bunch of questions concerning the NP900X3C.

The Community Help Wiki editor states that the latest BIOS for should be

BIOS P08AAH

From the official Samsung web-pages I can only find the

BIOS P04AAC

1) Where can one get the latest version?
2) Did anybody test it?
3) Is there a way to upgrade the BIOS without having Win7 installed?

Concerning the kernel

4) Has anybody tested the kernel upgrade to 3.6 in Quantal (from the links in #244)? Any actual benefit?

Thanks!!!

1. The BIOS upgrade is available on the Samsung web site
2. Many people did. It seems to solve the problem for a few days (or hours) and things go back to the way they were before. Search the thread for detailed description.
As far as I know, it did not permanently solve the problem to any Samsung Series9 user
3. Not as far as I know (and I searched a lot, before repartitioning and installing Windows). If you come up with a method, let me know

4. It does not solve this particular problem (lid state and power state issues). Some claim it provides better power saving - I personally have not seen that. I switched back to 3.5 to be current with the distribution's kernel and get the upgrades when they are available.

Aviramj, thanks for your answers. But

1) the link posted in the Samsung Series 9 ubuntu community wiki leads
to a Samsung web page from which I could download
Update Software (Firmware) (ver.1.0.0.3) which corresponds to BIOS
version BIOS P04AAC[/B] (I tried with same results US, UK, FI, and IT web-
sites ).

2) If someone has really downloaded BIOS P08AAH, could she/he be so kind
to post the link?

3) There is an ARCH wiki page on the topic.
I have upgraded the BIOS but on a Dell laptop from GENTOO
GENTOO.
I heard of flashrom.
I am still wondering whether anybody has already tried it or there is some other
recommended "Ubuntu way".

4) Thanks for sharing your experience. Which revision of 3.6 did you try, specifically?

Paolo - sorry, I missed the specific BIOS versions; when was this new version released? I visited the Samsung support center (in Korea) earlier this year, and they updated the BIOS to the latest version they had at the time.

Sorry, I can't say which 3.6 I used; I believe it is 3.6.0 that introduces most of the power savings. As I said, I couldn't see a huge difference and just went back. I'm sure if you're doing a lot of tweaking (powertop and such) you will benefit from 3.6.

I'm sure many people will be happy to know if you found a way to upgrade the BIOS from Linux. All I could find were solutions for DELL, and even then, for specific models.

@Paolo: P08AAH is here:
http://sbuservice.samsungmobile.com/...WIN_P08AAH.exe

Let me know if you find a way of upgrading without Win7. I'm also curious to hear if that solves your lid close issue.

@aviramj. Thanks! I will report but I think I will wait first for Samsung to render available the BIOS from the laptop official support pages. At the moment I am experimenting with kernel 3.6.6. from UpUbuntu. Up to now acpitool -a -b always reported correctly the battery state. I will report any further finding directly in launchpad.

I'm using kernel 3.6.7 I believe and I did encounter the battery state not changing issue. I fixed the problem by doing a reset of the battery with a paper clip. Haven't experienced it again. I am, however, experiencing a complete freeze of the computer on occasion. It's not repeatable. Lastly, I've been having a lot of trouble waking the computer up after suspending it. Nearly every time the screen remains black and I can see the cursor but no desktop. Switching to tty1 and then back to tty6 fixes it. Anyone have a solution for this?

Call me stupid, but I'm still unable to get keyboard backlight keys (Fn+F9/F10) to work.

The nobebook is Samsung-900X3C-A02. I've made a clean installation of ubuntu 12.10, updated all the packages, and added/modified some files in /lib/udev as described here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=838036

Now if I run "/lib/udev/keymap -i input/event3" in a console as root and press Fn+F9/F10, I can see appropriate keycodes (kbdillumdown/kbdillumup). But when I go back to X and try to press Fn+F9 to turn backlight down, nothing happens. That is, sometimes nothing happens, but sometimes all the apps stop responding to mouse clicks and to keyboard. However, Unity still responds: I can launch new apps from the Launcher, but can't do anything in the apps themselves. If I go to a text console and back (Ctrl+Alt+F2, then Alt+F7), then things go back to normal. But still no effect on the backlight.

Once I saw a glimpse of correct behavior: after things stopped responding to mouse clicks and I went to the text console and back, I briefly saw the Unity popup thingie showing that it's turning down the backlight. But this only happened once, I wasn't able to reproduce it.

If it's important, BIOS version is P02ABK. I tried installing P08AAH from a link posted earlier on this forum, but the installer said that that firmware was meant for 900X3B and it won't install on 900X3C. I'm guessing P02ABK is the latest BIOS for 900X3C?

Also, kernel is 3.5.0-19-generic. I also tried 3.6.9-something in a previous installation, but there wasn't any difference.

A small update: I've learned how to reproduce that strange glimpse of adjusting keyboard backlight. This is fun. Here's a sequence of actions:

1. Reboot
2. Login
3. Press Fn+F9 (keyboard backlight down). Nothing happens.
4. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2, then Alt+F7. After this I see a Unity "adjusting backlight down" popup.
5. Go back to step 1.

After like 4 or 5 reboots I was able to turn keyboard backlight off completely. Simply repeating steps 3 and 4 doesn't work, I have to reboot every time.

Sorry for posting so much, I just have more news on my keyboard backlight issue. It turns out I can control it using sysfs:

echo 0 > "/sys/class/leds/samsung::kbd_backlight/brightness"

turns kbd backlight off, for example.

So, scancodes for Fn+F9/F10 are turned into keycodes correctly. Also, samsung_laptop driver is able to change kbd backlight brightness correctly. But there is a problem somewhere on the way from the keystroke to the samsung_laptop module. Does anyone have a similar problem? Did anyone get it to work on 900X3C?