Samsung series 9

[apoikola]

Hi,

Now I got the 11.4. working with dualboot. Some testing..

Function keys
Same keys work as for most of people: fn+(f2,f3,f5,f9,f10 and Fn Lock) others don't do anything. When I was still using 10.10 the screen brightness (f2 and f3) didnt't work either.

Touch-pad

my issue is still that i can't click-drag a window by it's title bar. it doesn't work. i get around it by double-click the title bar, and dragging...which is actually a little more fluid, but still it bothers me that click-drag doesn't work. every place you expect to use click-drag doesn't work (e.g. corner of a window to re-size). again, you can get around it with double-click drag.

I have never really used two-finger touch-pad before and here are some of my experimental learnings.

I learned to drag and drop by using only one finger. Initially I tried with to fingers (one clicking and other dragging), but as soon as the touch-pad recognizes two fingers at the same time it stops moving the cursor, so that the dragging didn't happen.

Also double-click ( not the traditional double click ( two shorts .. ), but one short and other continuous . _ ) with one finger works for drag and drop.

Two finger scroll works after enabling it from the mouse preferences.

Right-click works by clicking or double tapping with two fingers at the same time.

Freezing / locking out

Is anyone else having these freezing problems? If so, and if we can figure out why more precisely, we should submit a bug report.

I had it once, little after copying 1.3 GB of documents from my external hard drive to the Ubuntu one -folder.

[siwelchungster]

Does anyone's Turbo Boost work?

I tried to see if I could kick it into action with this small script that I found on an askubuntu question:

while:; do:; done

but when I do a:

grep MHz /proc/cpuinfo

it maxes out at 1401mhz on one core. Is this an accurate assessment of Intel Turbo Boost not working?

[chrisallenlane]

Are you using Unity with Ubuntu 11.04? I would suspect this locking up - happened to me, too.
Try if Ctrl-Alt-F1 works to get to another virtual terminal, where you could kill all processes containing "unity" (e.g. 'pkill -f unity' and then 'unity --replace' to restart it). Use Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to your gdm session.

Hi Blueyed

I'm actually not running unity at all, because I didn't much care for it. I'm just logging in with the "Gnome Classic" or whatever.

I didn't go so far as to try to uninstall the unity plugins or anything though, so perhaps that's worth a try. I don't plan on using them, so I guess I don't have much to lose.

Also, I didn't know about Ctrl-Alt-F1. Thanks for the tip!

[apoikola]

It seems that I'm repeating all possible problems from this thread (against my own will).

Not closing properly (reported elsewere in this thread)
Yesterday night when trying to close Ubuntu, it didn't close, it just stayed at the empty screen with this purple Ubuntu default background and I had to hard-reset the machine by pushing long time the power button.

Before closing, it warned me that Ubunu one was still running and syncing (slowly) my 1.3 GB Ubuntu One -folder. I didn't care I just forced it to close and after that it hung.

Today I trier to boot to Windows and it didn't work! I choose Windows from the grub menu and it started something, but then only stayed at black screen. I don't know if his has something to do with failed closing of Ubuntu?

Freezing and Kernel Panic

Also, I'll second the OPs report about having great difficulty getting grub to stick. (I didn't have any trouble initially, probably due to dumb luck, but had to do a system reinstall this weekend, and now I'm having all kinds of Grub problems.) Unfortunately, when I try to boot from 10.10, I actually hit a kernel panic that forces me to take the damn machine apart to yank the battery. The hard-reset of holding the power button down doesn't seem to work once I've hit a kernel panic.

Is anyone else having these freezing problems? If so, and if we can figure out why more precisely, we should submit a bug report.

Today again the whole operating system locked (except for the mouse cursor). I tried the Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then:

pkill -f unity
unity --replace

and returned with Ctrl+Alt+F7. Everything was fine for few minutes and then suddenly I "hit the kernel panic", which is new and not very pleasant experience to me!

Kernel panic is mentioned also in this blogpost of chris-alen-lane http://blog.chris-allen-lane.com/201...ries-9-laptop/

Currently my Samsung 9 is in Kernel panic with something like:

Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception Interrupt
Pid: 945, comm: Xorg Tainted ...

See the picture here: http://pixelpipe.com/ticket/eQyO7_xO...c-3a6ac0ef0e55

I assume that I have to take the battery out as well :/

[apoikola]

I actually hit a kernel panic that forces me to take the damn machine apart to yank the battery.

How did you do that? I didn't dare to open the still "running" machine although I started by taking the three small scrows out from the bottom. Video: http://bambuser.com/channel/apoikola/broadcast/1671696

[aviramj]

Great thread! There is simply not enough information about Linux on the series 9 anywhere. Glad to hear experience from other users.

Does anyone have any ideas regarding battery life? I can get about 4 hours of battery life, and maybe 5 if I close just about everything. I am using 11.04 and it seems to have all the latest and greatest in battery savings; and yet when I called Samsung to ask about external batteries their answer was that "it wasn't needed because the laptop gives more than 7 hours of battery life".

Is keyboard backlight the main reason do you think? Is there a way to turn it off manually? I'm also wondering if the wireless and bluetooth are to blame since there is no way to turn them off on the hardware level (or is there?)

4 hours with a non-replaceable battery is really bad these days... I'm sure we can do better.

For the record: 11.04 installed without a problem, and after updating to the latest packages everything works except FUNC+F7/F8 (keyboard backlight), FUNC+F12 (wireless switch) and FUNC+F1 and F6 (who knows what those are).

[chrisallenlane]

How did you do that? I didn't dare to open the still "running" machine although I started by taking the three small scrows out from the bottom. Video: http://bambuser.com/channel/apoikola/broadcast/1671696

Hi apoikola

I'm sorry you're having the same problems. I'm still having them too, unfortunately :/

Regarding removing the battery: yeah, you've just got to hunt around for the screws. They're all on the bottom of the laptop, though some are hidden underneath the rubber bumpers, which you'll have to remove. (If I recall, there are screws beneath the large rear bumpers, and the two smaller bumpers on each side near the slide-down connector enclosures.)

Once you get the screws out, you've really just got to pry a little bit on the bottom of the case to get it to pop. It's a bit nerve-wracking, but once you get it off there, actually pulling the battery isn't too big of a deal. You'll be able to easily identify the wire connector attaching the battery to the main board. Yank that thing and you're set. And yeah, you'll have to do it live :/

Also, if that sounds insane to you, it's probably because it is. Surprisingly, I've done this a few times at this point without killing my hardware, which is, I guess, a silver lining. Hopefully you'll have the same good fortune.

The pointer I'll give is that you need to be careful not to bend the metal casing at all. I've got a very slight bump in the metal near my keyboard on the topside, from what, I know not. I assume somehow I torqued it funny or something and strained the metal a little.

Good luck!

[kev000]

I did a fresh install of 11.04(64bit) and I must say I'm quite happy. Wifi works using the open source drivers (brcm80211) out of the box. However, does anyone else see performance issues with wifi? I seem to have range and speed issues. It says I'm connected at 54Mb/s but I'm only able to transfer (scp) 700KB/s ? Doesn't seem right. Shouldn't 802.11n be faster?

That's my only complaint. I love this laptop. Pricey, but it's the best laptop I've ever owned. Super light, fast, and pretty. I can live with some of th Fn keys not working.

Oh, I have also seen random kernel panics and lockups. Not very often though so I'm fine with that.

[TomaszC]

Did anyone try to use the latest kernel to see if it fixes any problems (wifi, lockups)?

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.39-oneiric/


I don't have a Samsung Series 9 laptop yet, but I'm seriously considering to buy it. A number of issues makes me hesitate a bit - so I'd be glad to hear if 2.6.39 kernel makes this laptop work any better (or, worse...).

[Pille456]

Hio,

I've ubuntu 11.04 running on my samsung 900x3a and it works quite okay. Beside the fact, that the touchpad is not working as it should (mentioned before in this thread) the wifi makes quite a lot of problems.
The wifi is working, but it is too slow. I'm currently sitting at home with my 54 MBit wlan, but get only 11mb/sek (I sit around ~4m away from the router) and have a ping around 500ms to google and cannot download faster than a few kb/sek.
I already upgraded to 2.6.38-9, without any effect and use the proprietary drivers.
Anyone an idea?

Edit: Maybe this is not all about the driver, but about the networkmanager too? Sometimes I've got the feeling, that everything works fast and good, but then suddenly I'm loosing my connection and everything works slow again.