Samsung NC20

[Barry Carroll]

i use the openchrome driver from the jaunty repositories.

i also have two questions for you

i know somone other already asked the question, when my display backlight turns off after some time idleing it does not wake up again.
is there a soultion for this problem?

i read some of you changed the wifi card to an intel card.
i've got an intel 3945ag which worked perfectly in my old eee but the nc20 completly ignores this card.
it does not even appear in the bios.
a bios update did not solve the problem.
so what is the trick with the other cards?

regards
derlachendehans

edit:
i just double checked it, i turned my color depth back to 24 bit and i had a the freeze again.

I haven't found a solution for the backlight issue but when that happens I usually suspend the laptop and then resume it and the backlight comes back.

I put in an intel 5100 and it was picked up straight away - I wasn't aware of any bios lockouts like you see on other laptops. Are you 100% that it is seated firmly and correctly?

[pureblood]

I cannot manage to play videos on my laptop. I am trying to play a mov file (mjpeg for video and pcm_u8 for audio) and I either get bad audio with vlc, or I get really sloppy video with mplayer, both with the option '-vo xv' and with the option '-vo x11'. Other files work better though.
Does anybody know a solution for this?

[thawn]

Barry: Way to go. The wiki is great!

To everyone having video related problems with backlight, wakeup, console switching, external monitors or movie playback: It might be worthwhile to try intrepid (32-bit) with the via closed source drivers (see my post on page 1 of this thread for a howto).

I do not have any problems with these drivers. The backlight/wakeup/consoleswitch problems were my main prompt to use them instead of openchrome. They do also support movie playback acceleration.

With that installation I do not seem to have problems with skype, although that might be because I use alsa 1.0.18 and an external camera with a built-in microphone.

Barry: What problems did you have with the via drivers and what do you mean by openchrome performance being better? Certainly not 3d, since that is not supported by the driver yet afaik. Do you think it makes sense to include info for intrepid and the via drivers in the wiki (I could do that)?

[Barry Carroll]

Sounds good!

I meant that the 2D performance was pretty good with openchrome but the issues with the backlight and other acceleration problems has been making me curious about your method so I might try that.

I think the alsa / mic problems are only for the built in microphone which simply isn't recognised before the update The quality isn't the best though but that doesn't really bother me as I hardly use it.

[pureblood]

thawn, I think the wiki is only about Jaunty Jackalope, so it might be confusing to put information about Intrepid. Although, I would be curios to know why the closed source driver fail to work with Jaunty. Is that a problem with the new Xorg? Do you think they will update the closed source drivers and post them on VIA website? In that case it would be worth it to put a link on the wiki so that people can periodically check if the closed source drivers are now provided or not.

[IdealVithVodka]

I've just received my nc20 2day. I tried few distros on it (live CD) and it seems that debian handles it quite good as he detects the video mode without major problems (well, he makes it virtual so some parts of the desktop are outside the physical screen). Tried backtrack v3 and it did start using vesa mode in 1024x768 (very good to be honest). Didn't have much more time to test other stuff - will do that later in the evening.

[thawn]

thawn, I think the wiki is only about Jaunty Jackalope, so it might be confusing to put information about Intrepid.

That's exactly why I asked first before making changes to the wiki.
The way I would suggest to do it is to set up the whole wiki so that it explains how to get it to work under jaunty and intrepid by adding different subsections specifically labeled for jaunty and intrepid. For example (just the headings):

Video/Graphics
Openchrome driver (intrepid and jaunty)
...
Via Drivers (intrepid only)
...

Touchpad (intrepid and jaunty)
...

etc...

edit: This is also how the opencheome wiki (and many others) does it, when explaining different ubuntu releases.

Although, I would be curios to know why the closed source driver fail to work with Jaunty. Is that a problem with the new Xorg?

The problems are probably mainly the new xorg and maybe also the newer kernel.

Do you think they will update the closed source drivers and post them on VIA website? In that case it would be worth it to put a link on the wiki so that people can periodically check if the closed source drivers are now provided or not.

I sure hope so! However it might be a while until they support the new xorg. If I added the sections for intrepid, we would get the link automatically and could update the wiki accordingly, once the driver becomes available for jaunty, too.

[pureblood]

I have this annoying problem that every once in a while the wireless driver fails to connect to the access points and the network manager prompts me with a new password for the access point. Nothing seems to make it work at that point, other than restarting the driver. I wrote this alias:

alias fixath5k='sudo modprobe -r ath5k && sudo modprobe ath5k'

to speed up things a little bit. The annoying problem comes up even after I installed the iw5100 intel wireless card. This is so annoying. So I wrote for that the following alias:

alias fixiw5100='sudo modprobe -r iwlagn iwlcore mac80211 cfg80211 && sudo modprobe iwlagn'

Why is this problem so widespread among linux wireless drivers? Believe it or not, sometimes I have the same problem with my android phone, which uses the wlan driver. It seems something deep in the linux wireless stack or something. It is so annoying.

[thawn]

I have this annoying problem that every once in a while the wireless driver fails to connect to the access points and the network manager prompts me with a new password for the access point. Nothing seems to make it work at that point, other than restarting the driver.
Why is this problem so widespread among linux wireless drivers? Believe it or not, sometimes I have the same problem with my android phone, which uses the wlan driver. It seems something deep in the linux wireless stack or something. It is so annoying.

I am having the same problem with all my wireless linux systems. However the problem is not as pronounced recently. I found that it helps (for a while) to open the network manager and delete the wireless connection. afterwards it'll work for a couple of days...

[thawn]

Still got Skype not working properly with Linux on this machine.

CPU usage goes up most of the times to 100%, skype test calls give me a distorted or time stretched calls.

I have the same problem trying to use alsa 1.0.20 and the internal microphone.

However, using another microphone (external, bluetooth or usb) and alsa 1.0.17 (the standard intrepid package) skype does work nicely.

Barry: you said earlier that skype works for you? is that with the internal mic? If yes, how did you do it?