I've spent a while messing around with Natty on the Samsung 9 Series and wanted to share my experiences here. I am focusing on Kubuntu 32bit 11.04 in this write-up.
I've tried a variety of installations, both 32 and 64 bit, 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04, ubuntu and kubuntu, none of which worked perfectly out of the box (wireless being the main problem). I also tried Fedora and CrunchBang but Ubuntu offered the best out-of-box experience.
I noticed that installing from my USB CD drive I had to plug the data line into the right USB port and the power line into the left, which is apparently to do with the left USB being USB3.0.
My issues are:
- Wireless was not working at all (although it worked in ubuntu 11.04 32bit, but for some reason did not detect my wireless network even though it detected other wireless networks in the area). Strangely, wireless worked on the kubuntu live disc but not on my install.
- Keyboard backlight adjustment does not work. (Fn F7/F8 )
- Sleep function when closing the laptop lid - the laptop did not wake up and required a hard-shutdown. When I open the laptop lid, the blue power LED is fading in and out, presumably indicating sleep mode. I press the power button and the LED goes solid blue, but the screen and keyboard backlights remain off, and the harddisk LED goes on for about half a second then remains off. From here I must hard-shutdown (push the power button for five seconds).
-wireless on/off keyboard function key does nothing (Fn F12) but turning wireless off in network manager does work.
Things that worked straight away:
-accurate display resolution (did not work on 10.04, stuck in 1024 x 768 )
-sound
-screen brightness adjustment keyboard function keys (Fn F2/F3)
-volume adjustment keyboard function keys (Fn F10/F11)
-volum mute keyboard function key (Fn F9)
-trackpad on/off keyboard function key (Fn F5)
-wired ethernet connection
-mouse vertical scrolling on the trackpad
-webcam (tested by opening video settings in kopete, and it worked straight up)
-bluetooth (tested with HTC Desire, worked perfectly)
-headphones jack
Things I have not yet tested (I'm sure there are more):
-USB 3.0 speeds
-HDMI output
-64bit 11.04 distros
If anyone wants me to do some tests please feel free to ask and I will do my best to provide info. Overall support for this laptop by ubuntu out of the box is very good. But wireless is the big killer for me so any help with that is much appreciated.
MY ATTEMPTS TO FIX WIRELESS SO FAR:
any help fixing this is much appreciated
The samsung 9 series laptop uses the Broadcom BCM43225 device, which is listed in the broadcom-STA-common package (which is not installed by default and I do not install it). On a fresh install, wireless was not working at all. I managed to get the wireless card to detect wireless networks in Kubuntu using the info earlier in this topic. I ran the command
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source
and this enabled me to see wireless networks, which I could not see with a fresh install. However it did not detect all the networks in the area, and my network was one that was not detected. To try to fix this I removed the version of bcmwl-kernel-source and downloaded an older version of bcmwl-kernel-source from
http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/bcmwl-kernel-source
and installed it by double clicking the downloaded deb package. This 'fix' was from
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1700897&page=2
Unfortunately there was no difference running the maverick version. My network still did not show up. I also tried the lucid version but the install caused crashing so I replaced them with the natty version again.
The networks that are currently detected are all about 20-35% strength and have a variety of security (WPA-PSK and WEP).
My network is detected and I can connect to it with Kubuntu 10.04 32bit installed and with bcmwl-kernel-source reinstalled.
I have a Dlink DIR-855 router which I doubt is the problem since every other device (including three desktops with wireless cards, four laptops and four mobile phones) works fine with that router. The network is not hidden.
Any suggestions of how to investigate this problem would be most welcome, as a laptop without wireless network is pretty-much pointless.
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