Bugfixing the eeepc for Lucid

[bornagainpenguin]

BREAKTHROUGH: As some of us have begun to suspect, many of the bugs we're encountering are kernel related, this next tip seems to confirm those suspicions...

I just installed the latest kernel (as of this writing) from Daniel Hollocher's linux-ck ppa, and by doing so dropped my wakeups-from-idle per second to Hardy Heron levels! Most welcome of all, using this kernel seems to stop the jbd2 process from doing so many writes to the disk on ext4! I tested this out on my desktop and have yet to confirm on my eeepc (reinstalling as I write this message) but this looks to be a major breakthrough in getting performance to work again and getting idling to function on battery in a more sane way!

Test ppa for packaging the ck patchset. See lp:#424927

To add this ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chogydan/ppa && sudo apt-get update

To install:

sudo apt-get install linux-ck-generic linux-ck-headers-generic

To get help, please visit: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9249519

Make sure you edit grub to set the timer so you can be sure of selecting the right kernel at boot. Also bear in mind the need to redo the WiFi if you're using the Ralink drivers in the guide!

That's the good news. The bad news is I seem to be having issues getting the fan to run properly. Installing the kernel above brings all kinds of benefits in latency and in reducing wakes from idle, but it also makes the system behave strangely with regards to the i810 driver. Also. sensors doesn't seem to be automatically loading the coretemp modules unless you run the detection sequence and add it to modules. The fancontrol script doesn't seem to be doing much and the eeepc (like many many other mobile devices this release) runs hot burning my hands on the hand rest and making me fear for the life of the device if I keep trying to get Lucid to run on it.

Unless someone has good news for me I'm about to abandon ship for either Debian or rolling back to Hardy again...

--bornagainpenguin

--bornagainpenguin

[bornagainpenguin]

eee-control has been updated for Lucid! I figured people following this thread might be interested in hearing this bit of good news...all three of them!

--bornagainpenguin

[milkyspit]

eee-control has been updated for Lucid! I figured people following this thread might be interested in hearing this bit of good news...all three of them!

--bornagainpenguin

That is darned good news!

I've got Lucid running on an original Eee PC 4G that my wife uses for home and graduate school work. My problem is the wireless is completely non-functional under Lucid. Any tips on what to do to get that going? The rest of the system is working nicely, so getting the wireless running would make it just about perfect for her needs.

[bornagainpenguin]

That is darned good news!

I've got Lucid running on an original Eee PC 4G that my wife uses for home and graduate school work. My problem is the wireless is completely non-functional under Lucid. Any tips on what to do to get that going? The rest of the system is working nicely, so getting the wireless running would make it just about perfect for her needs.

That's the 701 model, right? That's strange as from what I've seen most of those models usually work out of the box in most forum posts. Do you know which model WiFi card you have? A good bet would be to try the eeeuser.com forums to see if someone more familiar with your specific model eeepc is able to walk you through what worked for them. Good luck!

--bornagainpenguin

[katzman2]

Will this problem have an effect on desktop units. My desktop keeps querying the battery and then logging me out. The only clue is that the message "checking battery state" comes onto a black screen (like the old dos screen) and that is all I can read but the next screen to come up is the login window.
Thanks
katzman2

[bornagainpenguin]

Will this problem have an effect on desktop units. My desktop keeps querying the battery and then logging me out. The only clue is that the message "checking battery state" comes onto a black screen (like the old dos screen) and that is all I can read but the next screen to come up is the login window.
Thanks
katzman2

???

I'm sorry I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you have an eeepc?

--bornagainpenguin

[bornagainpenguin]

SIGH

I'm already rolling back to Hardy again as I contemplate a Fedora attempt. I had Lucid installed with reiserfs and it just crashed on me hard leaving me with a very corrupted file system. I'm not sure what exactly the cause of the problem is (I suspect the fact it was running at near 145 F might have had something to do with it myself) regardless I am done with this pile of steaming $#*! called Lucid Lynx.

If anyone else wants to try taking over the thread they're welcome to it.

--bornagainpenguin

[milkyspit]

SIGH

I'm already rolling back to Hardy again as I contemplate a Fedora attempt. I had Lucid installed with reiserfs and it just crashed on me hard leaving me with a very corrupted file system. I'm not sure what exactly the cause of the problem is (I suspect the fact it was running at near 145 F might have had something to do with it myself) regardless I am done with this pile of steaming $#*! called Lucid Lynx.

If anyone else wants to try taking over the thread they're welcome to it.

--bornagainpenguin

I'm sorry to hear that and realize you must be incredibly frustrated. I don't think Lucid is a pile of steaming $#*!. It's been working well for me on three different systems, one of which is my Eee PC 4G (=701).

You've helped several of us a great deal with this thread, and from me at least, thank you! Incidentally, my wireless issue has been resolved, and I'm ashamed to admit that I had wireless disabled in BIOS... once enabled in BIOS, it worked fine. In a weird way your assertion that wireless just tends always to work with Ubuntu on these Eee PC units was what led me to dig deeper to find my (very embarrassing) problem.

Gotta ask: why ReiserFS? It's basically unsupported at this point, the lead developer is in prison, the company has essentially folded its operations... more the the point, its performance tends not to be any better than ext3 and certainly is inferior to ext4, and ReiserFS has some nasty vulnerabilities which can lead to, well, pretty catastrophic filesystem messes. Was there a particular reason you were running it as opposed to one of the alternatives? I'm just curious, sorry for prying.

[bornagainpenguin]

I'm sorry to hear that and realize you must be incredibly frustrated. I don't think Lucid is a pile of steaming $#*!. It's been working well for me on three different systems, one of which is my Eee PC 4G (=701).

I have had Lucid on three different systems, one of which is my eeepc 901L. For the most part on the desktop Lucid seems to work pretty well, only falling down in cosmetic issues like the annoying notification area bug that Canonical and Gnome developers seem to be intent on ignoring. Canonical as they chase after "windicators" and Gnome as they gear up for 3.0. Other issues seem to have to do with the kernel and as such really are across all distros at this point unless they patch their kernels intensively...

You've helped several of us a great deal with this thread, and from me at least, thank you! Incidentally, my wireless issue has been resolved, and I'm ashamed to admit that I had wireless disabled in BIOS... once enabled in BIOS, it worked fine. In a weird way your assertion that wireless just tends always to work with Ubuntu on these Eee PC units was what led me to dig deeper to find my (very embarrassing) problem.

Errm...no. That's not what I said exactly. When I said WiFi seems to mostly just work--that was specific only to those earlier celeron 7xx models of the eeepc. They use a different wireless card than the other models do and that card seems to be better supported over all. I'm glad the issue was resolved for you, but I had to clarify that WiFi does not just work on all eeepcs...that would not be true at all! It just seems the 7xx models and celeron based models work better with their hardware being detected and working.

Gotta ask: why ReiserFS? It's basically unsupported at this point, the lead developer is in prison, the company has essentially folded its operations... more the the point, its performance tends not to be any better than ext3 and certainly is inferior to ext4, and ReiserFS has some nasty vulnerabilities which can lead to, well, pretty catastrophic filesystem messes. Was there a particular reason you were running it as opposed to one of the alternatives? I'm just curious, sorry for prying.

Don't apologize. It was an experiment to see if the file system work be faster at boot like ext4 is except without the runaway process described in the first post. ext3 seems to work just fine, but it is a bit slower and I really like to be able to show off the boot of my eeepc as a method of boosting Linux. The boot and the crisp fonts are two of the biggest features I always show off Linux with because the legibility and boot times of most Windows based netbooks is a joke. Compiz always gets a good response also, especially when they see using it integrates with the work flow and doesn't slow the system down like using similar features on Windows does.

The fact I get all this and am barely touching the one gigabyte of RAM the system comes with is always an eye opener!

The sad truth is there aren't very many options in the installer to allow a user to choose from. Of the options available I've gotten good results with only ext2-ext4 and reiserfs. The other file sysetms have fallen down on me when I've tried to use them or insist on doing horrible disk checks every third boot. Then there is the bonus of reiserfs being supported by Acronis True Image, which allows me to pull out a mostly updated and patched system to test things quickly otherwise it would take me nearly a day to do all the stuff needed to install Hardy again once I failed to get an upgrade to work...

Ordinarily I'd have not bothered with reiserfs for all the reasons you listed but it was recommended in the thread I had on the Ubuntu section of the eeeuser.com forums as a replacement for ext4 when it became clear it was behind some of the constant disk activity when the system was supposedly at "idle" but.... SIGH.

I'm glad you found the posts to be useful!

--bornagainpenguin

[milkyspit]

...Then there is the bonus of reiserfs being supported by Acronis True Image, which allows me to pull out a mostly updated and patched system to test things quickly otherwise it would take me nearly a day to do all the stuff needed to install Hardy again once I failed to get an upgrade to work...

On my primary two laptops I've been running LVM2 and using its snapshotting capability along with fsarchiver and an external hard drive to make compressed filesystem images. The beauty of this approach is that I can do so with a live system, without introducing corruption. On the flip side, it's quick and painless to restore the saved image, and I can even restore to a different filesystem than had been in place at the time of image creation. I've come to love this approach as it has, for the first time, given me the ability to keep robust sets of backup images without suffering significant downtime. You might look into that to open some more options beyond TrueImage, if that helps anything.