Slackware on Pangolin Performance

[pilbender]

This is a typo, according to the suggestion from System76:
acpi_psi="Linux"

It should be:
acpi_osi="Linux"

It makes sense as this is actually a valid option from my kernel sources. But it did not help. Suspend still does not work. I have a few other things i can try, but it appears to be a lost cause. Extremely disappointing.

scott

[val67]

This is a typo, according to the suggestion from System76:
acpi_psi="Linux"

It should be:
acpi_osi="Linux"

It makes sense as this is actually a valid option from my kernel sources. But it did not help. Suspend still does not work. I have a few other things i can try, but it appears to be a lost cause. Extremely disappointing.

scott

Is there any confirmation from s76 that suspend works at least for ubuntu, which they officially support?

Val.

[isantop]

Suspend in Ubuntu on all of our laptop models is working nearly flawlessly. Plus, with the improvements they've made to the process in Ubuntu, it takes all of a second from power on to unlock screen.

pillbender: Ubuntu boots in around 10-15 seconds on my machine, including BIOS time, grub, and logging in. After this, the system is ready to use. The Ubuntu devs have done a lot recently to get the boot process as streamlined as possible, resulting in super fast boots.

[pilbender]

Suspend in Ubuntu on all of our laptop models is working nearly flawlessly. Plus, with the improvements they've made to the process in Ubuntu, it takes all of a second from power on to unlock screen.

pillbender: Ubuntu boots in around 10-15 seconds on my machine, including BIOS time, grub, and logging in. After this, the system is ready to use. The Ubuntu devs have done a lot recently to get the boot process as streamlined as possible, resulting in super fast boots.

You may be right, but that's not he case when you chain load and put Grub in the root superblock. It takes forever to load as the kernel does its BIOS probing.

Glad suspend is working for you, but that's not the case on my Ubuntu install or my Slackware install.

Furthermore, the wireless card is glitchy. It fails once in a while and the only fix to get it back is to reboot. It usually works for several hours (even days) before this happens.

With the exception of these 2 items, I love the laptop. Unfortunately these are extremely irritating shortcomings. I would highly recommend that other buyers not touch the default install on the Serval Professional. If you plan on doing what I'm doing, be prepared for disappointment and frustration.

[pilbender]

I just had the wireless card go down again in only a few minutes and I was able to remove the module and reload it using:

rmmod r8192se_pci
modprobe r8192se_pci

That brought it back up without a reboot. Just in case anyone else is running into this.

I will also post the solution, if I ever find one, to the suspend problem. I really don't care of the boot up time is slow if I never have to boot the laptop.

[3Miro]

Did you get the default wireless on the serval or the "Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 - 802.11A/B/G/N Wireless LAN Module" upgrade. Supposedly the Intel one should work out of the box with 2.6.35 kernel without glitches.

[pilbender]

I ordered the default wireless. I still have a G series router I have a B series one somewhere that still works too.

I just find I don't need any more speed than that. I'm either searching the Internet for something, committing source code, or making transfers of only a few hundred MB's now and then to servers.

I have kernel 2.6.35.7 on my Slackware instance. Perhaps a module was missing from that, but stock Slackware is normally pretty good about including all possibilities. It was not recognized in my case without the download I mentioned in an earlier post.

There are a few other downloads on that Realtek page that might work more reliably. I'll try them if things get too messy with this one.

Sometimes brand new hardware is like this on Linux and I'm hopeful that eventually this laptop will be supported flawlessly in the future.

It has been fantastic for the programming I'm doing because the turn around times are amazing. This thing really chews up anything I throw at it from a raw crunching standpoint. I really like the performance and it makes my work so much more enjoyable. I can focus on knocking tasks down rather than waiting for memory to swap and processors to churns while I execute deployments.

I'm not regretful of my purchase. Just disappointed on the suspend front mostly and the wireless front to some degree. It's still worth it in my case. The difficulties may not be a proper trade off for other people who prefer to run Linux distributions besides Ubuntu.

[pilbender]

I just did another update of Slackare Current, reinstalled multilib, and installed a new wireless driver again.

Realtek just updated their driver on 10-25-2010:
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/...Downloads=true

Remember, I am using: RTL8192SE on the download page.

We'll see if this one has any more trouble. Hopefully this will work without dropping once in a while.

[pilbender]

So far the wireless has been flawless since that new driver update. I'm not completely convinced it's perfect, but it is definitely better. If it lasts for a few days, I'll know it's totally perfect.

I'm so elated. So one more thing left. Suspend. If I can get that working things would be perfect. I'll post back in a few days with a wireless update, good or bad.

scott

[pilbender]

I'm still having periodic problems with the wireless. I'd say it's better overall, but it's still glitchy and I have to

rmmod r8192se_pci
modprobe r8192se_pci

to reset it. This seems to happen sporadically, just as before. Sometimes it happens after a few minutes, sometimes it happens after sitting all night.

I'll keep watching for another update and I'll rebuild it if there is one.