Difference between revisions of "UMID SE"

Revision as of 12:12, 6 April 2012

This guide assumes that you are experienced in installing Archlinux. If you are not experienced, please read this guide in parallel with the Beginners' Guide or the Official Installation Guide. No assumptions are made on your desired environment (DE/WM). Note that the SSD will completely be wiped if you follow this guide without alterations.

Installing Archlinux

Boot the archlinux installer from the USB medium and log in as root.

Wireless connection

Since you don't have any ethernet, you'll need to manually configure your network before starting the setup. Here, we assume that the wlan is not encrypted:

ip link set wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid "your_wlan_essid"
dhcpcd wlan0

If your wlan is encrypted, follow the instructions in the Beginner's Guide. If it's not encrypted but requires you to login at a captive portal, you can use elinks to enter your credentials.

SSD partitining

You'll also need to manually format the SSD before using the installer. Use GPT as described in the SSD Article. This ensures that your partitions are properly aligned. Install and run it:

pacman -Sy gptfdisk
gdisk /dev/sda

Type o to clear out the partition table and then create at least 3 partitions by typing n and answering the questions (type ? or m for help). You need at least a 2MiB Partition at the beginning for the boot loader as well as a bit more than 1GiB of swap space to be able to use hibernation. Your partition table should look something like this in the end (for example using 8GiB for / and the rest for /home :

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
  1            2048            6143   2.0 MiB     EF02  BIOS boot partition
  2            6144         2463743   1.2 GiB     8200  Linux swap
  3         2463744        19240959   8.0 GiB     8300  Linux filesystem
  4        19240960        61865950   20.3 GiB    8300  Linux filesystem

Type w to write the partition table. Note that the SSD doesn't seem to support TRIM. Make sure to leave plenty of free space on each partition so you don't run into performance issues.

Running the installer

Progress through the installer as usual, but mind these things:

• When configuring the hard drive, select to configure the mountpoints manually and choose the mountpoints accordingly. Regarding filesystems, you can select ext2 for the BIOS boot partition. For the root and any other regular partitions ext4 is a good choice.
• You absolutely have to select wireless-tools from core to be installed in order to be able to connect to the wlan in your freshly installed system. You may also want to select netcfg.
• When editing the config files, edit /etc/fstab and add the noatime,nodiratime,discard options to your ext4 partitions. Also remove network from the DAEMONS array in /etc/rc.conf.
• Skip the bootloader installation, exit the installer and DO NOT REBOOT!

Installing the bootloader

After exiting the installer, do this while still running from the install medium. Prepare the environment:

cp /etc/resolv.conf /tmp/install/etc/resolv.conf
modprobe dm-mod
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc/
mount -t sysfs /sys /mnt/sys/

Chroot into your fresh installation:

chroot /mnt bash

Install grub2:

pacman-db-upgrade
pacman -Syy
rm -rf /boot/grub
pacman -S grub2-bios
grub-install --directory=/usr/lib/grub/i386-pc --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=/boot --recheck --debug /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now you're ready to reboot!

Configuring the system

Power saving and thermal monitoring

The UMID SE can get quite hot because of the relatively powerful CPU and lack of air flow. This happens especially when charging the batteries. Keep an eye on the thermals at all times. Refer to dzen for an example on how to do this efficiently. Enable cpu scaling, configure the thermal sensor and enable all power saving options as follows:

Install cpufrequtils and lm_sensors:

pacman -S cpufrequtils lm_sensors

Edit the governor line in /etc/conf.d/cpufreq selecting the ondemand governor. No other options are required.

governor="ondemand"

Run sensors-detect and hit enter answering YES to all questions.

sensors-detect

In /etc/rc.conf add acpi_cpufreq to the MODULES array and @cpufreq @sensors to the DAEMONS array:

MODULES=(acpi_cpufreq)
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng @crond @cpufreq @sensors)

Reboot to apply the changes. As a quick way of checking what's going on you can run something like this:

watch -n 0.5 "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz; sensors"

A few more suggestions on how to save power, which have not been tested for effectiveness, are listed below. You can add these to /etc/rc.local:

iwconfig wlan0 power on & # wlan powersaving
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs & # increased disk writeback
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog / & # disable nmi watchdog

Graphics driver

There are several drivers and they're all terrible. The probably best option at the time of writing is the pbs_gfx driver used with fbdev. The performance (for playing videos for example) will nevertheless be awful but it works well for regular work. Install it as follows: Add psb_gfx to MODULES in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and rebuild the kernel initramfs:

mkinitcpio -p linux

Install the fbdev driver:

pacman -Sy xf86-video-fbdev

You should now be able to install and run X.

X

Install Xorg and whatever DE/WM you want to use. You don't need any xorg.conf yet. Launch X.

Screen brightness

The psb_gfx driver allows for easy brightness settings via /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness. Just echo a value between 0 and 100 to that file and the brightness will be set. Here's a suitable script for changing the brightness using keyboard shortcuts.

#!/bin/sh
#increase or decrease the brightness by about 10%
current="$(cat /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness)"
if [[ "$1" == "up" ]]; then
    current=$((current+((current/10+1))))
    [[ $current -ge 100 ]] && current=100
elif [[ "$1" == "down" ]]; then
    current=$((current-((current/10+1))))
else
    echo "1st argument should be 'up' or 'down'"
    exit 1
fi
echo "$current" > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness

Place it in /usr/local/bin or similar, allow it to be run by regular users using visudo and then you can bind it to the brightnes key combo on your keyboard by whatever means, for example through your WM. You may want to write the new value to a file and reload it upon boot-up or you can just set it to a default upon boot-up by adding this to /etc/rc.local

echo 40 > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness &

Touch screen

At the time of writing, the touch screen works out of the box as a relative "touch-pad-like" pointer device. After some correspondence with EETI, the following can be said:

• The official "eGalax Touch driver" 3.06.5625 from EETI does only work up until xorg 1.8.
• The newer "eGTouch daemon driver" does not support the PS/2 interface used in the UMID SE.
• I've been given an update driver via email but I cannot disclose it at this time. Feel free to contact EETI through the email address mentioned at EETI and ask for the updated egalax_drv.so for Xorg 1.11.

When you have the updated egalax_drv.so, do the following. Add this to /etc/rc.local, enabling raw access to the device at /dev/serio_raw0:

echo -n serio_raw>/sys/bus/serio/devices/serio1/drvctl 

The following kernel options must supposedly be enabled by adding them in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet i8042.nomux=1 i8042.noloop=1"

Install the 3.06.5625 driver via AUR by editing the PKGBUILD for xf86-input-egalax-beta, updating the Version to 3.06.5625 and the source URL to

http://home.eeti.com.tw/web20/drivers/touch_driver/Linux/20110831/eGalaxTouch-3.06.5625-32b-k26.tar.gz

Run the PKGBUILD and install the package. Then copy over the updated egalax_drv.so overwriting the outdated one:

cp ./egalax_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

Use the following /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "EETI"
    Driver "egalax"
    Option "Device" "/dev/serio_raw0"
    Option "Parameters" "/var/lib/eeti.param"
    Option "ScreenNo" "0"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "Default Layout"
    InputDevice "EETI" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Reboot. You can now run TKCal to calibrate your touchscreen and it should work as a proper absolute pointing device.

Optical Mouse

Not working yet. TODO

Keyboard

Special keys

Create a file /lib/udev/keymaps/umid-se containing:

0xEE battery           # Fn+Q
0xDF sleep             # Fn+W
0xD5 switchvideomode   # Fn+E
0xF0 record            # Fn+R
0xF6 camera            # Fn+T
0xF9 brightnessdown    # Fn+A
0xF8 brightnessup      # Fn+S
0xA0 mute              # Fn+D
0xAE volumedown        # Fn+F
0xB0 volumeup          # Fn+G
0xFC wlan              # Fn+J

Edit /lib/udev/rules.d/95-keymap.rules adding this after LABEL="keyboard_vendorcheck":

ENV{DMI_VENDOR}=="UMiDCorp", ATTR{[dmi/id]product_name}=="M-BOOK", RUN+="keymap $name umid-se"

The above vendor and product IDs can be found under /sys/class/dmi/id/*. The codes themselves are written to dmesg when hitting the keys. Reboot to apply the changes.

Capacitive stripe

The UMID SE comes with a capacitive touch area above the keyboard (where the grey dots are). Input is given as keycodes. This is relatively useless and also litters dmesg with warnings about unknown scan codes. To remedy this, you can append this to /lib/udev/keymaps/umid-se as pointed out above:

0x75 prog1
0xF5 prog1
0x6F prog1
0xDA prog1
0x5A prog1
0x62 prog1
0xD9 prog1
0xE0 prog1
0xE2 prog1
0xEF prog1
0x59 prog1

This will associate the whole general area with the XF86Launch1 keycode. You can now use the area as a hotkey like any other key. It's quite sensible though and may fire unintentionally, which is why it best left unused.

Suspend and hibernation

Should work in theory when using the psb_gfx driver for Poulsbo and using pm-suspend. Doesn't seem to work yet. TODO

Webcam

Doesn't seem to be even connected. Not visible at all. Probably needs to be enabled by some sort of kill switch instruction. TODO

Additional Information

BIOS password recovery

The AMI BIOS of the UMID SE can be read out and decrypted using cmospwd which is in AUR.