Samsung Series 5 ULTRA NP530U3B

[tomasyanez]

Updated 12.04 with no problems.
I've had some issues with bluetooth

Improved battery performance changing values in
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT instead of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX

I only charge battery to 80% at that gives me around 4hrs. I'll do more tests.

I'll try to make a clean install on the 16GB ExpresCache

[aroque]

Updated 12.04 with no problems.
I've had some issues with bluetooth

Improved battery performance changing values in
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT instead of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX

I only charge battery to 80% at that gives me around 4hrs. I'll do more tests.

I'll try to make a clean install on the 16GB ExpresCache

Good to hear, thank you for sharing your experience.

[donmiguel]

Hi, thanks fro sharing tomasyanez


Could be please report how much power your machine is using just after booting up?

You can see this with the tool powertop, which displays the watt use when on battery power.

Thanks a lot

cheers

[hpdami]

Hi everyone!

I've the same laptop and the same issues with it. My battery lasts around 1h and 20 min, compared with the almost 3h in Windows and the energy loss rate is now in 34Wh.
I've written the above commands in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_(DEFAULT), and it doesn't do anything, the problem still stands.

There is another problem that may be related, the device gets really hot, around 80ºC, even with the fan very 'loud'. In windows, with the fan almost silent, it reaches 40ºC, 50ºC.

Just booted:
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +75.0°C (crit = +99.0°C)
temp2: +29.8°C (crit = +99.0°C)

radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1: +70.5°C


Could it be a problem realted with the graphic card?

I have this one:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Thames [Radeon 7500M/7600M Series]

But I haven't been able to install them, the fglrx drivers doesn't get on well with Gnome Shell (it simply doesn't run).

Any help would be really appreciated! Thank you very much!

[modafokaxx]

If you run

sudo lspci | grep -i vga

you'll find that there are 2 video cards, not one.
This is one of these hybrid GPU systems, much like nVidia's Optimus (fiasco?).

The idea is neat: have two cards, a light one that takes care of the regular stuff, and a better one that will be used for heavier graphics rendering.

Unfortunately, the way it's been implemented is rather a mess from what I understand, and the end result for us is that both cards run, at the same time, with the Radeon video card drawing full power although it's not even being used. Hence, poor battery.

On the NP530U4B I have here, you can't disable the Radeon GPU from the BIOS either.

So, right now, our best hope is to see the Bumblebee project manage AMD/ATI hybrid cards alongside nVidia's Optimus system.


Also, I'm interested, what performances do you get on your SSD partition? (/dev/sdb here)
(the mSATA Sandisk SSD i100 16GB)

I'm quite disappointed by the thing, it has read speeds of 6.5 MB/s and write speeds between 5 and 11 MB/s. The mechanical HDD has a read speed of 87.5 MB/s.
The cache and latency is good though, so I'm hoping that it will still make Ubuntu nice and snappy, but still…

[mcarson01234]

Has anyone gotten suspend to RAM to work on this hardware with 12.04? On mine it spins the disk for a few seconds, blanks the screen (but leaves the backlight on) and then just stops.

Suspend to disk does the same, but when I power cycle it, the restore works. Based on this, I suspect that suspend is working, except that it's not changing the hardware's actual power state. Can anyone help point to a way to fix it, or diagnose the issue?

[aroque]

Ok, if I understand correctly the poor battery performance reported above only occurs with the AMD Radeon HD 7550 graphics card shipped on the 14'' version (NP530U4B) but not on the 13'' version which has an Intel graphics card. Otherwise the experience seems to be positive.

P.S.: it would be great if at least some of these information could be gathered in a more consistent way on https://friendly.ubuntu.com/

[s7dhansh]

I have the 13 same laptop (u3b).
1. I installed xubuntu on the 10gb partition of ssd (expresscache). I use windows as well, mostly because of the lack of three finger support and suspend, as of now. I haven't felt any performance decrease (windows) by the absence of expresscache.
I also use windows bootloader with a bit of help from http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/05/17...and-windows-7/ because of the grub issue.
I keep home and var on a hdd partition and tmp on ram. See: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1627197

2. The overheating and battery issue exists originally because of bad default kernel options.
Heating can be fixed by enabling active state power management and battery issue can be solved by the specific i915 options from http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...15_power&num=1

In short, what @sacapeao did -
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1"
in /etc/default/grub.

Also installing jupiter helped. http://www.webupd8.org/2012/03/jupit...itches-to.html

3. The suspend problem is yet unsolved and would love to get any help. The i915 video drivers seem to be the issue. Hibernate is working perfectly fine though.

4. The touchpad doesn't have three finger option. touchegg doesn't work (segfault). It seems to be a known bug and I hope it gets rectified soon.

5. While partitioning, I had to shift my recovery partition and in the process I have lost the use of my F4 recovery key. I intend to reclaim it and am in the process of finding a solution.

Any help with suspend, touchpad or recovery is welcome!

[s7dhansh]

Well, the suspend is working now. Thanks to this post - http://thecodecentral.com/2011/01/18...ot-working-bug

Create /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_custom-ehci_hcd with the following content

#!/bin/sh
#inspired by http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9744970&postcount=19
#...and http://thecodecentral.com/2011/01/18/fix-ubuntu-10-10-suspendhibernate-not-working-bug    
# tidied by tqzzaa :)

VERSION=1.1
DEV_LIST=/tmp/usb-dev-list
DRIVERS_DIR=/sys/bus/pci/drivers
DRIVERS="ehci xhci" # ehci_hcd, xhci_hcd
HEX="[[:xdigit:]]"
MAX_BIND_ATTEMPTS=2
BIND_WAIT=0.1

unbindDev() {
  echo -n > $DEV_LIST 2>/dev/null
  for driver in $DRIVERS; do
    DDIR=$DRIVERS_DIR/${driver}_hcd
    for dev in `ls $DDIR 2>/dev/null | egrep "^$HEX+:$HEX+:$HEX"`; do
      echo -n "$dev" > $DDIR/unbind
      echo "$driver $dev" >> $DEV_LIST
    done
  done
}

bindDev() {
  if [ -s $DEV_LIST ]; then
    while read driver dev; do
      DDIR=$DRIVERS_DIR/${driver}_hcd
      while [ $((MAX_BIND_ATTEMPTS)) -gt 0 ]; do
          echo -n "$dev" > $DDIR/bind
          if [ ! -L "$DDIR/$dev" ]; then
            sleep $BIND_WAIT
          else
            break
          fi
          MAX_BIND_ATTEMPTS=$((MAX_BIND_ATTEMPTS-1))
      done  
    done < $DEV_LIST
  fi
  rm $DEV_LIST 2>/dev/null
}

case "$1" in
  hibernate|suspend) unbindDev;;
  resume|thaw)       bindDev;;
esac

The ehci_hcd and xhci_hcd are the problem creators and need to be disabled before suspend.

Now eagerly waiting for three-finger support on the system!

[mcarson01234]

I can confirm suspend is working for me too, with that script. Oddly, I had tried removing those drives before suspend without success - something wrong with my technique in doing so, I suppose. Thanks!