The first thing I did when I got the device was install Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric Oncelot).  I’m a big Linux fan and now that I’m doing web development using an open source stack I’m free to use Linux on my machines instead of Windows.  The only downfall to Linux is the battery life.  On both my main laptop (a Samsung Chronos 7) and the Princeton battery life half what I can get in Windows.  I was determined to keep Linux on this device so I set out to get the maximum battery life on this device.

The following information is based purely on what I have found to work best for my machine.  I can’t guarantee this work for you or your machine but hopefully it can at least guide you in the right direction.  I have made some minor hardware upgrades to the laptop since I purchased it.  This included an extended battery I found on eBay, an Intel 320 series SSD and 8GB of RAM.  While the SSD and extended battery will give me better battery life, the tweaks I made are still generic enough that they should improve battery life on any machine.

I had read that the 3.2 kernel series had some nice power improvements, especially for Intel devices.  There are some PCIe ASPM (power management for PCI Express devices) issues in the mainline 3.2 kernel, but ubuntu has applied the fixes from the 3.3 kernel in their 3.2 kernel tree that will be included with Ubuntu 12.04.  PCIe ASPM is a huge battery saver so it was definitely something I knew I needed to have working properly.  There is a lot of documentation out there on the various issues and I highly recommend reading this article from Phoronix.  This article is based on the 2.6 kernel series but the issue haven’t changed much since then.  A Google search will bring up plenty more reading.

After cloning the Precise kernel from git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-precise.git I compiled a custom kernel tailored for the Samsung Princeton. Ubuntu kernels are good out of the box, however they include a ton of stuff I either don’t use, or is not needed for my machine.  I could spend an entire blog post on the decisions I made and why I made them, but for now I will just link to the config file I use.  I’m a make menuconfig kind of guy (which goes against the recommended way to compile an Ubuntu kernel) so you may have to change the config if you want to use the “Ubuntu way.”

Once the new kernel was up and running successfully, I turned my attention towards kernel command line arguments that are designed for better battery life.  After much research and reading I decided to use the four arguments I had found.  I changed the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULTS line in /etc/default/grub to the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1"

The first parameter is pretty straightforward, pcie_aspm=force.  What this does is to force the PCIe ASPM even if the BIOS tells the system it’s not supported.  This allows Linux to use the full power saving features of the PCIe devices in the laptop.  I have no idea if the Princeton suffers from this bug but I did notice a difference in battery when I applied that argument to the kernel.

The next kernel parameter i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 has some arguments around it’s use.  The parameter allows the GPU to enter a low power state when the GPU is idling.  That sounds great, but the caveat is it can also cause the GPU to use more power when running, albeit it at better performance.  It appears that it only uses more power when doing OpenGL or 3D things (at least from the information I could find), which I never do, however there seems to not be a lot of consensus on the matter.  I did notice a significant drop in power according to powertop with this parameter so I decided to keep it for now.  RC6 is not enabled by default because on some systems it can cause the GPU to hang.  In my limited testing I have not had any GPU hangs on the Princeton, so it does not appear that this laptop suffers from that bug.

The kernel option i915.i915_enable_fbc enables the frame-buffer compression (FBC) for the i915 graphics driver.  FBC, as you might guess, will compress the buffer that is being rendered on the screen.  This means less memory has to be used to for screen refreshes, which will lead to less power consumption.  This parameter is not enabled by default because on some systems the screen does not repaint properly when using a window manager that uses compositing (such as compiz).  However as with the i915_enable_rc6 parameter, this does not seem to be the case for the Princeton in my testing.

Finally, I added the i915.lvds_downclock=1 parameter.  This will enable the LVDS refresh rate to run at a slower clock speed.  Under-clocking usually has a positive impact on power consumption and definitely helps in this case.  This parameter is not enabled by default because on systems that do not support the down-clocking the screen can flicker while you are using the machine.  I have noticed zero flickers so far on the Princeton.

If you are interested in reading more about the kernel parameters, including benchmarks, I recommend reading this article on Phoronix.  It does a great job of explaining the parameters in more detail and provides an exhaustive list of benchmarks for all the parameters.

The final piece to the puzzle of better battery life is optimizing the system for power consumption while disconnected from the wall.  I will be posting another blog soon on what I did under Ubuntu 11.10.

I decided to try the 3.2 kernel one day on the laptop, mostly due to better power management, especially for the Intel drivers.  After I compiled a 3.2 kernel for Ubuntu, I noticed my touchpad was (mostly) working perfectly.  Everything worked except two-finger right-click (two-finger right tap works though) and the mouse was not nearly sensitive enough.  Tweaking the sensitivity settings under Gnome3 had no effect on the mouse.  I ended up tweaking the FingerLow and FingerHigh using synclient to meet my sensitivity needs, but I’ll detail that a bit later.

I would have stayed on the 3.2 kernel, however my hybrids graphics seemed a little quirky and I was not getting near the battery life I was getting under the 3.0 kernel that came with Ubuntu 11.10.  So I decided to switch back to the 3.0 kernel, however I wanted my touchpad working like it was in 3.2. So I took the changes from the 3.2 kernel and back ported them to 3.0.  The following instructions will show you how to set up your build environment, get the kernel sources, patch the kernel, compile and install the new kernel.

If you have never built an Ubuntu kernel before you will need to execute the following, which will install the packages you need to compile a kernel for Ubuntu.

Install build tools

sudo apt-get install fakeroot build-essential crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge
sudo apt-get build-dep linux
sudo apt-get install git-core libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libelf-dev asciidoc binutils-dev

Next, you will need to grab the kernel sources for Ubuntu 11.10 and make the necessary control files.

Get kernel source

git clone git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-oneiric.git
cd ubuntu-oneiric
fakeroot debian/rules clean

Once you have the source and made the control files, it’s time to patch the kernel for touchpad.  Download the patch from here and take a note of the path where you saved it.  Then patch the kernel via the following command

Apply patch for mouse

patch -p1 < ../dir/to/patch/file.patch

If everything worked correctly you should see the patch applied successfully.  If not, you may need to apply some parts of the patch manually.  After you have applied the patches it’s time to configure you kernel.  If you wish to have a starting point, download my kernel config from here and put it in the kernel directory and name it .config.  This config is tuned for the Chronos 7, though I still have a little more tuning to accomplish.

Configure kernel

make menuconfig

Once you are happy with the kernel, compile your kernel with the following command (replacing the 3.0.14.1 revision number with whatever revision you want).

Compile kernel

fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=3.0.14.1 kernel_image

The above command will place a .deb file one level up from the kernel source.  Install the kernel with the following command

Install kernel

cd ../
sudo dpkg -i NAME_OF_DEB.deb

You may get a warning message about replacing the current kernel.  If you do, just say yes and let it replace it.  It won’t affect anything and is necessary to get the new kernel installed.  Once this is complete, reboot and enjoy your working touchpad.  If you are happy with the sensitivity of the mouse you are done.  If not, read on for how to make it more sensitive.

Personally I like a pretty sensitive mouse.  By default the mouse sensitivity on the Elantech with the patch above was awful.  I had to place almost my entire finger on the touchpad to get it to scroll and trying to adjust the settings in Gnome3 had no effect.  So I used the synclient tool to adjust the sensitivity and created a shell script to apply the settings on each reboot and wake from sleep.

First create a file called elantech_synclient.sh in ~/.local/bin and put the following in the file

elantech_synclient.sh

#!/bin/sh
 
synclient FingerLow=10
synclient FingerHigh=20

The final step is to make gnome run this file one reboot and wakeup.  Run the following command replace codemonkeyjava with your username for login.

Make Gnome run script

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.input-devices hotplug-command "/home/termleech/.local/bin/elantech_synclient.sh"

Congratulations, you now have a fully working touchpad on your Chronos 7 in Ubuntu 11.10.

If you liked this post or if helped you in any way, consider buying me a cup of coffee.

The packaging for the Intel drive was incredibly impressive.  In addition to the drive and the mounting hardware, the packaging included a USB3-SATA cable and a rubber enclosure for your old hard drive, an adapter for a 3.5″ drive bay, a screw driver, an internal SATA cable and power adapter and cloning software.  The USB3-SATA cable, and rubber enclosure for your old drive, is easily a $40 addition to the packaging and really show Intel commitment to the customer.  The price of the drive was $219, which is a little more than my Force3, but the easy of installation and extras more than made up for the additional cost.  I did not try the cloning software as I was running Linux and assumed it didn’t work, so I can comment on how good the software actually is.

The first step of installation is removing the bottom plate from the Princeton.  I had previously done this for the Force3 so there were no surprises here.  I took out the battery first, followed by the protector for the SD slot.  Next came the memory cover, which only has a single screw to hold it in place, followed by the actual memory of the system.  Once the components had been removed, all that remains is eight screws holding the bottom plate on.  I did say 8, even though you will only see 6.  There is a screw hidden under each of the rubber footings.  Carefully remove the rubber footings (I used a plastic flat head screw driver).  They seem to retain their stickiness even after a few removals which is a relief since I had this laptop apart quite a few times when I was trying to get the Force3 to work.

The bottom plate is held on by the infamous Samsung plastic hooks (they have the same thing on my Chronos 7 and my Galaxy Nexus and they are giant pain).  After carefully prying off the bottom you have access to everything you need.  The first time I took apart the laptop I was shocked to see that the hard  drive is not actually mounted via any screws.  It just sits there in a rubber enclosure.  The Intel SSD comes with a black rubber railing on the top, so the first time I tried to install it, I just took out the old hard drive and put in the Intel drive.  After I snapped the computer back together, I noticed a slight buldge on the palmrest right above the drive.  So I took the black railing off the Intel drive.  However upon doing that I noticed the screws now stuck out on the drive and there were no screws that were shorter to use.  So I put the Intel drive in the rubber wrapping that the original drive had and did not use any screws.  It kept the drive together pretty good.  I put the drive back in and there was no longer a buldge on the laptop.

After putting the laptop back together and booting to an Ubuntu USB drive, everything works perfect.  I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the laptop and it’s running spectacularly.  I patched the stock Ubuntu kernel with a new scheduler, called FIOPS, which was designed by an Intel engineer specifically for SSD drives.  It’s based on the CFQ kernel scheduler but removes all the code that deals with platter drives and optimizes it for and SSD.  I got the patches from a friend who does Android development and will post more about them in a bit.

The speed of this  drive is amazing.  Even on a Core i3 machine with only 4GB of RAM, this machine flies.  A cold boot takes about 2-3 seconds, which is incredibly.  I’m getting about 200MB/s for transfer speeds in my benchmarks.  Overall the Intel 320 series drive is a great upgrade for anyone.  I would highly recommend the drive, despite seeing a lot of bad reviews out there.  Installation was flawless and I have had zero issues with the drive.

Name: AT&T US
APN: wap.cingular
Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
Port: 80
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: <not set>
MMS Proxy: <not set>
MMS Port: <not set>
MCC: 310
MNC: 410
Authentication type: <not set>
APN type: default,supl,agps,fota,dun

Name: AT&T US HSDPA
APN: phone
Proxy: <not set>
Port: <not set>
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: <not set>
MMS Proxy: <not set>
MMS Port: <not set>
MCC: 310
MNC: 410
Authentication type: <not set>
APN type: default,supl,agps,fota,dun

Name: AT&T US Tether
APN: broadband
Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
Port: 80
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: <not set>
MMS Proxy: <not set>
MMS Port: <not set>
MCC: 310
MNC: 410
Authentication type: <not set>
APN type: tether

Name: AT&T US MMS
APN: wap.cingular
Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
Port: 80
Username: <not set>
Password: <not set>
Server: <not set>
MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com
MMS Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
MMS Port: 80
MCC: 310
MNC: 410
Authentication type: <not set>
APN type: mms

Hopefully this will help anyone like me who is always searching for these after flashing a new ROM.

After doing some google searching I came across a number of people with the same issue.  I eventually was led to this post, http://mediumexposure.com/smart-image-resizing-while-preserving-transparency-php-and-gd-library/ which describes how to do a resize while maintaining transparency.  The original sfThumbnail plugin has the following code in the sfGDAdaptor.class.php file (some lines have been removed for brevity):

Source code

public function loadFile($thumbnail, $image)
{
  /* ... removed for brevity ... */
  $this->source = $loader($image);
  $this->sourceWidth = $imgData[0];
  $this->sourceHeight = $imgData[1];
  $this->sourceMime = $imgData['mime'];
  $thumbnail->initThumb($this->sourceWidth, $this->sourceHeight, $this->maxWidth, $this->maxHeight, $this>scale, $this->inflate);
 
  $this->thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($thumbnail->getThumbWidth(), $thumbnail->getThumbHeight());
 
  if ($imgData[0] == $this->maxWidth && $imgData[1] == $this->maxHeight)
  {
    $this->thumb = $this->source;
  } else {
    imagecopyresampled($this->thumb, $this->source, 0, 0, 0, 0, $thumbnail->getThumbWidth(), $thumbnail->getThumbHeight(), $imgData[0], $imgData[1]);
  }
 
  /* ... Removed for brevity ... */
}

If you make the following changes, you will now be able to resize transparent png files and keep their transparency.  This will supposedly work for transparent gif files as well, however I have not tried it.  If you have and it works, please leave comment.

Source code

public function loadFile($thumbnail, $image)
{
  $this->source = $loader($image);
  $this->sourceWidth = $imgData[0];
  $this->sourceHeight = $imgData[1];
  $this->sourceMime = $imgData['mime'];
  $thumbnail->initThumb($this->sourceWidth, $this->sourceHeight, $this->maxWidth, $this->maxHeight, $this->scale, $this->inflate);
 
  $this->thumb = imagecreatetruecolor($thumbnail->getThumbWidth(), $thumbnail->getThumbHeight());
 
  if ( ($imgData[2] == IMAGETYPE_GIF) || ($imgData[2] == IMAGETYPE_PNG) ) {
    $trnprt_indx = imagecolortransparent($image);
 
    if ($trnprt_indx >= 0) {
      $trnprt_color = imagecolorsforindex($image, $trnprt_indx);
      $transparency = imagecolorallocate($this->thumb, $trnprt_color['red'], $trnprt_color['green'], $trnprt_color['blue']);
      imagefill($this->thumb, 0, 0, $transparency);
      imagecolortransparent($this->thumb, $transparency);
    } elseif ($imgData[2] == IMAGETYPE_PNG) {
      imagealphablending($this->thumb, false);
      $color = imagecolorallocatealpha($this->thumb, 0, 0, 0, 127);
      imagefill($this->thumb, 0, 0, $color);
      imagesavealpha($this->thumb, true);
    }
  }
 
  if ($imgData[0] == $this->maxWidth && $imgData[1] == $this->maxHeight)
  {
    $this->thumb = $this->source;
  } else {
    imagecopyresampled($this->thumb, $this->source, 0, 0, 0, 0, $thumbnail->getThumbWidth(),   $thumbnail->getThumbHeight(), $imgData[0], $imgData[1]);
  }
}

The build include Faux’s new kernel (0.21) running at the stock 1Ghz speed.  The new kernel has some great improvements in it and should really go a long way towards better battery life.

I have flashed this build and in my initial testing it runs better than any build I’ve tested up to this point.  It really feels like a polished build.  Once the fingerprint bug is fixed an integrated this will definitely be the best ROM out there for the Atrix.

Full list of what works and what doesn’t can be here.  Bolded items are new items for this build.

The build can be downloaded from the usual place.

Screenshots from the new build below.

That being said I will no longer have time to do any consulting work so I am shutting down Code Monkey Java as a business. Instead it will become my new blog.  It will be a lot of work but it will open up the opportunity for me to be able to finally blog like I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.  I’m looking forward to putting up a post a week to start and hopefully increasing that to a few posts a week.

So what will I be posting about, well anything and everything.  I’m a technology focused guy so most of my posts will likely be technology related, but I’m sure there will be plenty of flair.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy your stay.