Linux on the ASUS N10 N10J

Well, while now, yes, since I'm not at home. I had to set up zip-proxy on my home bsd-based serve to make it just a bit usable. I'll be back to my fast internet connection in two days or so, and I'll post the stuff as soon as I get there.

 

in the .config you provided the only thing associated to PCIExpress
Dunno if this will help you for my CFcard reader(exprescard)

 

Those are the only options in the kernel config available for expresscard support... if there is something you need in the config it is not for expresscard support. I dug around in my last config and there are a few card reader modules I left out.... Since the expresscard you are trying to get to work is a CF reader, it's probably actually a USB interface and will be treated like a USB device. If you give the make/model # I can try and figure out what chipset it is and point you in the right direction. It might be a module in the config or it could be something else.

Edit: do a lsusb and it should show up... hopefully it has some clues as to the chipset it's using

 

I got it off of ebay I thinks it a generic card reader from what I see it's called R Cube Station

http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260325346103

I can download the drivers for Windows/Mac(but even they work stand alone: without the drivers)
Drivers: http://www.maxorigin.com/rcubestation/Product_Drivers/CF_express.rar

lsusb:

which I don't see anything out of the ordanary except maybe the Chicony


EDIT: I went into windows(i know the root of all evil etc) went to the device manager and it's telling me is a SCSI drive (JMCR CF SCSI Disk Device)

 

> Chicony

It's the webcam. What does lspci say? anything in dmesg upon inserting the card?

 

lspci(1st thing I checked) comes up with all the usual stuff i'll check dmesg when I get back from work

 

lspci

DMESG

when typing "modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1" i made an error then succ. loaded unplugged the expresscard and plugged it back in

not in fdisk either(have a 4GB inserted)

 

on Kernel 2.6.27.11

the first block is after bootup
2nd after modprobe
3rd after insert

 

SCSI support is enabled in my config. What happens when you try to mount sdb1?

Also check out this howto it might help you:
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/personal/cf-linux

 

in 2.6.27.11 the CF is mounted under /dev/sdb

 

It looks like I'm missing some PATA modules in the latest config for your reader... I'll update this post with a new config for 2.6.29-rc1

edit: working on my rc2 config right now...

 

Thanks alot guess that's the down side to having a smaller kernel

I think I've found it under
"Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA experimental drivers"
theres JMicron PATA support

 

Activation the driver for JMicro worked

I'd recommend activating all PATA driver incase of other people with CF card readers

 

Glad you got it working!

Now onto a new problem... in rc2 I have built it twice from two .config files (my previous one as an oldconfig, and my new one with the CF stuff), and I get: bug: unable to handle kernel null pointer dereference followed by a kernel panic when the kernel inits.

So if you try rc2 be prepared to bash your head against the wall as I am now doing.

Edit:
Looked at the changelog for rc2, looks like there were a lot of ACPI commits, so I'm going to assume this is a real bug. Going to wait it out and keep my eye on bugzilla and the kernel mailing list before I think about submitting a bug report. Since the Atom N270 doesn't support VT-d maybe there is a problem there. Specifically:

Edit 2: Also it looks like I can't go into standby in rc1, it just hangs there and my capslock and num lock LEDs go on like it's in some weird power state. Have to force it off and then turn it on again. Didn't have this problem in .28 stable

 

yeah I had that problem also with RC1 when I didn't make the initrd it would go into KERNEL PANIC mode and would freeze completly(SEGFAULT: which i've done a couple of times in assembly)

 

Oh man, yea I've done that one before but luckily that's an easy one to fix. I think this is a real bug... also do you have a problem going to standby in rc1 like I do?

 

I never really go into stand by I either have it on with the screen shutting off after 1minute or off, I mostly have it to store my camera RAWs(upgraded the HDD to 500GB) that's why I had the CF card reader :/

I can try to put it into stand by and report back

EDIT: yeah same result here it freezes up with NUM LOCK and CAPS LOCK stuck ON

 

I have some tweaks to boot/browse the web faster

Make boot up exploit dual-core

Look for CONCURRENCY=none and change it to:

Noteif you can't find the line add it at the top of the file
DO NOT MODIFY THE FALLOWING:

Reduce swap:

add or change vm.swappiness

Disable Ipv6 for faster lookup(ip wise)

Speed up web browsing

 

Hi there. I'm watching this thread (others as well) for a while now. Actually since I got my N10J which is around 2 months. This guide was REALLY helpful - thank you for it.
I have some questions however... maybe you can help me out.

1) I'm successfully playing h264 videos with patched mplayer (and smplayer to be precise), but when the quality is really good (today i watched a blue ray dump 1280x536 and dts sound) the video gets choppy once in a while. The hardware is totally capable of playing the file, it's just like something starts in the background and eats the processor? No idea what that would be - I stopped all I could think of. Or maybe this is something else... any ideas? On the other forum someone wrote about coreavc - has anyone tried it?

2) Any idea how to play videos with aac 5.1 sound? As of now I don't have a hw decoder that would handle aac, so I simply recompress to ac3 with avidemux, but I wonder if the sound is played through HDMI (afaik it cannot go through spdif)

3) I would to overclock the processor and graphics a bit I've tried nvclock, but it seems it doesn't work at all. About the processor I found no tools that could be used. Maybe the architecture of N10 is similar to the architecture of eee - the we could use the module used to oeverclock eee as a base (afaik the processors are the same). Are you planning on playing with this later on? Maybe I will, but I'm no expert :/

regards,

 

First, welcome, and second, I have run into the same thing. I think the code is still a bit sloppy, I'm not sure what the deal is there, but it's definitely in its early stages, since it was only released mid-November. At this point, I'd just wait for updates, and keep an eye on bugzilla. There is a massive thread I'm watching here, you might want to scan through it for your own purposes:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=123095

I'm not sure, because I don't have any S/PDIF gear at the moment... does S/PDIF out work? It should absolutely work over HDMI. But I am poor in that department as well for gear to test it with

Yeah, this is something I've been wanting to do too... but I haven't spent the time to figure it out yet. Maybe somebody else has?

I've overclocked in Windows to about 2GHz with SetFSB, so it'd be nice to have that option in Linux. If you make any progress let us know!!

 

S/PDIF works great. It plays AC3 and dts just as it should.
I will try to look into the CPU OC part

 

Forgot to address this part of your question... here's the link to the patches... just make sure to have subversion installed first:

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/source/checkout

 

update: checked hdmi sound on my tv - it doesn't work. Maybe i should check some options somewhere, I don't know. As for now it seems sound is not transfered over hdmi.

thx for the link on avc.On the other forum I got this link (to a tutorial):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=839295
maybe someone can use it too.

regards,

 

You may have to force it from the command line:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=116286&page=2#28

Also:
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=185519&page=2#28

Edit on 1/26
New NVIDIA graphics drivers today, updated howto for 180.25:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.25/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.25-pkg1.run

Updated howto for 2.6.28.2 stable, has no issues with standby/resume or bluetooth unlike .29-rc1

Kernel source: (removed, see page 1 for latest kernel or kernel.org)

Kernel config: (removed, see page 1 for latest kernel)

 

btw, any big changes in .25 nvidia drivers? Is it worth updating?

 

I'm not exactly sure... It's not on the NVIDIA site either, I just found it browsing their FTP. I upgraded my kernel so I installed since I had to anyway.

Edit: Here's the changelog:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1914053

Edit #2: Just got a redraw glitch... so the new drivers don't fix the compiz redraw issue.

 

Just got and installed the new drivers. ALllthough the glitches are still around, though less of them, 2d performance is _much_ better now. There seems to be a fresh xorg in repos, so I'll see if it fixes it for me.

 

2.6.29rc3 came out yesterday..... im compiling it

 

If someone with Ubuntu can try my kernel packages for 2.6.28.2 (instead of compiling from source) I'd be grateful. That would cut down the time in the first part of my howto greatly. Let me know if they work for Ubuntu (I know they work for Debian). These are built from pristine source (from kernel.org) with the 400MHz tweak as in the howto guide. They are here:

Edit: thanks, they work, rolled .debs into the howto

--

2.6.29rc3 is no good for me

It gives me the same error that 2.6.29rc2 gave me

It could be an ACPI problem in the BIOS causing that. I'm not exactly sure. Please post any clues

--
Edit: Even newer gfx drivers 180.27: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/180.27/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.27-pkg1.run

 

Hello All,

Thanks ALLurGroceries, I will give a try with Ubuntu 8.10 and let you know the output.

I was wondering if anyone could help me for the wireless which I find weak. I applied the 400Hz in the mlme.c file:

#define IEEE80211_MONITORING_INTERVAL (400 * HZ)

The computer can connect to my router, but sometimes it takes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes (It asks several times for the WPA key). The signal strength is medium, between 50% and 60%. (I have an XP laptop I use in the same location and the signal is excellent).

Also, when I browse Internet, It's a bit slow, some pages take ages to be displayed or just cannot be displayed and I have to reload the page. I also cannot download files or watch streamed videos. The beginning of the download is normal, download speed of 500-600 Ko/s. But usually after 1-2 minutes, the download hangs. However, the gnome network manager still display that I m connected to the network.

I also tried with 100 * HZ with no big difference (maybe a bit better).


Any suggestions are welcome.

An other small point, less important.
In firefox, when I right click on a link using the touchpad, I launch sometimes Evolution or open the properties of the link instead of displaying the normal menu.


Thanks in advance for your help.

 

allurgr..com must be down I cant get your packages

 

Wow I had a typo in the URL, my bad, I put a - where a . should have gone...

It's fixed now in the post... and my server is up

Do you actually have WPA enabled on the AP or is this an error? That's definitely part of your problem regardless.

The thing to do is to check it against Windows on the N10, not another laptop. The N10 has weak wireless no matter what.

The higher you go the better it gets (to a point) and 400Hz is about the sweet spot. If that doesn't work for you, something else is going wrong. It does sound like the kind of problem that happens when you don't have a tweaked kernel, so maybe try my .deb packages.

Try turning off 3 button emulation, in /etc/X11/xorg.conf comment out the line:

Code:

  Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "true"

 

basically what it is/does: Makes the computer check more often on the connection(so it doesn't drop) Now for the signal strength..I know back in 28rc1-5 my signal was about 45-50% Tops and I was in the next room from the router...(now it's 100%) anyways try a different location and try 250 instead of 100.. For the firefox... yeah I have that problem too : solution HOLD the right button down(if you are trying to get context menu), I found that it auto selects an option for you if you press quickly

 

tried you .debs, they work ( didn't install nvidia because I need the sources and didn't feel like downloading em) wireless was a little bit less responsive(62%, and couldn't connect b4 asking me the Wpassword), going to reboot now with rc3 and report back)


edit---------
rc3=nogo

 

Yea you're right the wireless is better by a lot in .29-rc1, I just can't deal with the standby/resume problems. I can't boot rc3 on my Asus G50V either, so maybe there is a larger issue in terms of a kernel bug. I am still digging for clues...

 

ALLurGroceries, Thanks for the guide, It has helped me out allot.
I am having problems with the Nvidia driver part, every time I do the "chmod +xNVIDIA-Linux-x86-180.27-pkg1.run" it returns "chmod: missing operand after '+xNVIDIA...'". What am I doing wrong?

P.S I know, noob question, but I am somewhat new to linux

Thanks
-KD5VMO

 

I made a typo! My bad. I fixed it in the howto. You just need a space in between the +x and NVIDIA

--

Edit on 2/4: I updated the howto for kernel 2.6.28.3, uploaded new .config and the .deb packages are on my web server ready for download.

Edit on 2/7: Update for 2.6.28.4. Re: 2.6.29rc2 and rc3: found this patch just submitted for the M50vm.

 

yeah the stand-by doesn't really bother me I use it for about 30 minutes and shut it off. I've noticed that they are making big changes to the ACPI PCI and even the USB(possibly prepping for USB3?)

 

2.6.29rc3 boots with the patch! I tried it on my G50V first and it worked, tried it on the N10J and it worked! I will add the .debs to the howto for .29rc3. If you want to compile it from source:

Code:

wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.29-rc3.tar.bz2
tar jxvf linux-2.6.29-rc3.tar.bz2
cd linux-2.6.29-rc3
wget -O .config http://allurgroceries.is-a-chef.com/public/config-2.6.29-rc3
export CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=2
make oldconfig
wget -O asuspatch http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/5985/raw/
patch -p1 < asuspatch
fakeroot make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd kernel_image kernel_headers

.. and then wait an hour and a half and install the .debs. Do the 400MHz wireless tweak BEFORE the last make-kpkg if you want to do it.

Edit: The standby/resume problem is gone in rc3! I'm going to try and figure out why bluetooth-applet doesn't work...

Edit 2: Bluetooth works with my new kernel config... I uploaded it

 

Cool,

I installed the kernel 2.6.29rc3 and it seems to work fine. The wireless seems to be quite better. I have between 80-100% signal strength (was only 40-50 with previous kernel). But it stil take a very long time to connect to my router, at least 2 minutes. I will test a bit further. I actually put back Vista earlier as you advised me to test the wireless. It was working smoothly on vista, excellent signal, no dropping, download and browsing very fast...

I quickly tried the bluetooth, it does not work. I don't know why either but I will have a look also.

Apart from this, all seems to be OK.

 

Uhg... sorry to make you reinstall windows, I didn't mean to do that!

In terms of the wireless not coming on for minutes... try doing a modprobe -r ath9k; modprobe ath9k to reload the module... especially on rc3 I'm finding that I need to do this more often when I resume from standby.

--

Edit: The bluetooth problem was with my .config -- it's a new module name in .29. Oops! The .config and .deb files are fixed now.

--

If you already installed rc3, you can uninstall it:

Code:

dpkg -r linux-image-2.6.29-rc3
dpkg -r linux-headers-2.6.29-rc3
rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.29-rc3/

It will ask you if you want to abort after the first dpkg command, answer NO. Then install the kernel built with the new .config and reboot. Make sure to have the NVIDIA drivers ready beforehand since they will need to be reinstalled immediately after rebooting.

 

There's a new mplayer vdpau patch script (from 26.01.09). It seems to fix my high quality h264 playback problems + it generally feels 100x more stable.

update: unfortunately it's not that peachy. I accidentally compiled mplayer with no alsa support (wasn't checking audio at all, just video). And the video was 100% fluent. But then i recompiled it with alsa and it's all choppy again. This makes me wonder....

regards

 

2.6.29rc4 just came out and now has the ASUS patch rolled in, it runs fine. I've uploaded a new .config and updated the howto.

Note: All kernel upgrades require reinstalling the NVIDIA drivers, make sure to have the installer on hand before rebooting. Refer to Part 2 of the howto on page 1 for the instructions. After you reboot with the new kernel, the first thing you should do is log in as root, stop gdm (or kdm) and run the NVIDIA installer.

 

One question: why do you compile the kernel with SMP on? AFAIK n270 is a single core processor...

regards

 

Thanks ALLurGroceries

I installed the kernel 2.6.29rc4 using your deb packages and it works great.

One question: What are the differences between your xorg file and the nvidia one (I forgot to install yours this time).

Also, I m a bit confused in regards modules. I did boot in the kernel 2.6.27-11 to remove the rc3 kernel and I was surprised that the wireless was working, How is this possible?

Thanks in advance

 

It has one core but supports hyperthreading... see /proc/cpuinfo (there are 2 cores listed)

Mine is a bit more tweaked than the NVIDIA one, probably not a terrible amount of difference overall. You can always call up an editor to look at them side by side

I'm not sure, maybe your 2.6.27-11 had ath9k built in, the way to tell would be to boot with 2.6.27-11 and do a lsmod | grep ath9k and if it shows up it's in the kernel. That'd be news to me that a stock kernel has ath9k built in, so let me know if that's the case because I should mention it in the howto.

Edit: It looks like 2.6.27-11 does have ath9k rolled in... I'll have to make a note of this. It came out in late December.

 

Are you 100% sure this is what SMP is for?
According to kernel config:
CONFIG_SMP:
This enables support for systems with more than one CPU. If you have
a system with only one CPU, like most personal computers, say N. If
you have a system with more than one CPU, say Y.

Plus I have a kernel without SMP and in /proc/cpuinfo I don't see any more cores

Also there's some debug info (for developers) thah I switched off possibly making the kernel a bit faster.

Oh and why Pentium Pro? I know ATOM is not listed but I've read it's closest to Core2.

regards,

 

Yes that's precisely the point. Without it in the kernel it won't use hyperthreading... With my kernel you should see CPU 0 and CPU 1 in your /proc/cpuinfo, thus you know you are utilizing hyperthreading.

686 is the default from Debian. There's some debate as to which to choose since neither are optimized for Atom... I am compiling a Core 2 kernel right now, I will post an update with the results.

 

Well that's exactly the "debate" i based my doubts on. Those guys wrote they had test results saying core2 with tune=generic gives best results.

 

Here are the debs: kernel image kernel headers or if you want to build it yourself here is my config file.

Edit: Removed links because they are out of date. Please see a newer post or page 1 for the latest kernel.