Linux on Series 7 2013 / Ativ Book 8

Hi guys,

long time lurker, first time poster. I recently bought a 770z5e. I use Windows only for games and Linux for productivity. There are some quirks of installing Linux and some things that need to be fixed afterwards. This will be a regularly updated post to monitor the progress and to share my findings with others. Currently I use Ubuntu 13.04. If you tried other distributions on this laptop, please share your findings here as well!

Installing

Please keep in mind that:
1. Things might work out differently for your machine.
2. I might have made mistakes while documenting.

Thus, always apply common sense when following recipes. Following these steps might damage your laptop or kill your kitten.

I installed an SSD and tried to clone/resize the factory image. The cloning failed several times with no specific error message, so I decided to start from scratch. Most difficult thing here? Getting a Windows 8 ISO.

• Get a Windows ISO
Follow this manual: Superuser: Where can I download a legitimate Windows 8 ISO?

• Switch of Secure Boot
Go into the BIOS (F2) and go to the Boot tab. Set the boot device priority to the external drive and set:

Secure Boot [Disabled]
OS Mode Selection [CSM and UEFI OS]

• Install Windows normally
I used a DVD and an external drive to install Windows. You should not run into trouble here. I already assigned a partition D: for the future use of Linux, so you don't need to shrink any partitions in the future. Write down the exact size of the D: partition.

• Install Linux
When asked how to install it, choose Something else for manual install. Search for the former D: partition, you recognize it by the size you wrote down. Delete it and make a couple of new partitions:
- Swap: If you want to use Hibernate at some point, assign a swap partition bigger than your RAM. I have 8gigs of RAM and assigned 10gigs of Swap
- Reserved boot area: 200Mb. I cannot remember the exact name of this, but when trying to install without, Ubuntu will complain.
- Maybe EFI. Useful read: UEFI - Community Ubuntu Documentation I read just now that it recommends to use Windows EFI partition to boot. I made a "mistake" there and created a seperate one. Works fine though.
- Root: All the rest for the root filesystem, I chose to format it in ext4.

Fixing stuff

Now it will boot into Ubuntu, but not into Windows.

• Fix grub
Taken from askubuntu: Grub does not show a Windows 8 option after dual boot.
Make a file /etc/grub.d/30_windows and fill it with:

Code:

#! /bin/bash
cat << EOF
menuentry "Windows 8" {
    insmod part_gpt
    insmod chain
    set root='(hd0,gpt2)'
    chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
EOF

Make it executable:

Code:

sudo chmod a+x /etc/grub.d/30_windows

To show the boot selection, edit some lines in /etc/default/grub from

Code:

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

to

Code:

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=1

Run sudo update-grub2 and reboot.

• Fix Touchpad
Out of the box the touchpad will be recognized as some kind of PS/2 mouse. Guestures and multi-finger stuff will not work. Help came from here: HOWTO: Series 9 Elantech Touchpad Ubuntu 12.10, Mint 14. You need to install dkms and download and compile a custom driver:

Code:

sudo apt-get install dkms
cd /usr/src/
sudo wget http://www.ouam.fr/~madko/ubuntu/elantech/psmouse-elantech-v7.tar.bz2
sudo tar jxvf psmouse-elantech-v7.tar.bz2
sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v elantech-v7
sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v elantech-v7
sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v elantech-v7
reboot

• Add mouse middle click
The awesome touchpad of the 770z5e has a leftclick and a rightclick, but no middle mouse button. The usual workaround to click left and right simultaneously will not work. A nice solution can be found here: askubuntu: How to configure the touchpad middle click? We can then emulate a middle mouse click by a three-finger tab. A working middle mouse key is essential for Linux copy&pasting!

You can place the script in another directory, e.g. /usr/bin or /etc, if you wanted it to be in a more "generic" place, in case you have multiple accounts in your ubuntu installation. I used ~/.bin, I used it also for all kinds of other scripts.

Replace <your_user_name> by your actual user name.

Code:

mkdir ~/.bin
echo synclient TapButton3=2 > ~/.bin/touchpad_settings.sh
chmod +x ~/.bin/touchpad_settings.sh
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.input-devices hotplug-command "/home/<your_user_name>/.bin/touchpad_settings.sh"
reboot

• Two-finger scrolling
Now we can also activate two-finger scrolling if wanted: Go to System Settings -> Mouse & Touchpad -> Two-finger scrolling

• Fan control
Install samsung-tools:

Code:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:voria/ppa
sudo apt-get install samsung-tools

The program easy-slow-down-manager is not in the repository for 13.04 anymore, because of the UEFI-bricking problem Samsung laptops bricked by using UEFI. In the latest Kernels this should be resolved ( YMMV!), so we can still install them by hand.

Code:

wget http://ppa.launchpad.net/voria/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/e/easy-slow-down-manager/easy-slow-down-manager_0.15~ppa1~loms~quantal_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i easy-slow-down-manager_0.15~ppa1~loms~quantal_all.deb
reboot

With Fn-F11 you can show the fan state and switch between normal, silent and speed.

• Keyboard layout
I am using a different keyboard layout. The laptop has a German keyboard and I switch back and forth between the NEO-layout and the standard German one for "guests". You can add additional layouts under System Settings -> Keyboard layout. Under "Options", you can change the key to switch layouts to the Menu-key (Fn-0 on the NumPad) and use the CapsLock light to indicate which layout is in use. Very handy!


Unsolved issues
• Hibernate
Hibernate is not working. In this article PowerManagement/Hibernate it states:

Hmm, "[...]on systems with broken BIOSes". No further comment on that.
The funny thing is, the shutdown variant actually works, if done by hand. I could not find out how to use that as default for the built-in Hibernate. Suggestions welcome! Further reads:
archlinux: pm-utils
ubuntuusers pm-utils (in German)

• Buttons
Certain Fn-Buttons are not working. F1 does weird stuff, F9 F10 F12 are not working at all.
At the Numpad, NumLock cannot be switched on. The default actions are the cursor keys, etc.
The WiFi light is constantly on, but does not do anything.

• Brightness controls
Screen brightness is not stored after (re)boot. Keyboard backlight is working out-of-the-box on auto, manual does not work.

Did you know...?
• That under Linux you can have about the same battery life as under Windows?
• That, once the touchpad is fixed, a four-finger tab by default opens the dash?

Summary
There are still a lot of things that I did not test yet. But so far Linux is running very well on the Chronos Series 7. With some tweaks it is one awesome machine. Some minor quirks remain, but I'll update this thread when I found out more about them. Feel free to share your experiences, ask questions or give suggestions!

 

[Reserved for future updates]

 

Welcome to the forum, Lekkerkerker. You are making a great first impression

 

Hey you beat me to the guide, I was considering making one

Just want to throw some tidbits out there, for 3 and 4 finger touchpad support, use a program called touchegg.
touchegg - Touchégg - Multitouch gesture recognizer - Google Project Hosting

And to turn off the Radeon GPU and achieve amazing battery life and cool temps, consult this thread:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=164182

Right now my only problem is the speakers aren't as great on Linux due to the lack of software enhancement...

 

Hi Metroid_III,

thank you for posting these useful links. I found this Radeon GPU thread as well. It's awesome and it works! I wrote a little script that I want to share.

Make a file /usr/local/bin/graphics_switch and fill it with:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to switch the dedicated 8870m graphics card on and off.

case $1 in
        "ON"|"on")
                echo '\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._ON' > /proc/acpi/call
                if grep -q "0x1" /proc/acpi/call
                then
                        echo "8870m is ON"
                        notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/status/network-transmit-receive-symbolic.svg "graphics switcher" "\n 8870m is ON"
                else
                        echo "error"
                        exit 1
                fi;;

        "OFF"|"off")
                echo '\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._OFF' > /proc/acpi/call
                if grep -q "0x0" /proc/acpi/call
                then
                        echo "8870m is OFF"
                        notify-send -i /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/status/network-error-symbolic.svg "graphics switcher" "\n 8870m is OFF"
                else
                        echo "error"
                        exit 1
                fi;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: graphics_switch [ON|OFF]"
                echo "Script to switch the dedicated 8870m graphics card on and off.";;
esac

exit 0

Leave the notify-send lines out if you don't want a popup. Make it executable: sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/graphics_switch. Usage: sudo graphics_switch [ON|OFF]
A word of warning: Never, never use the proprietary fglrx drivers! It will not work and on top of that totally mess up your compiz settings. Since I don't use the 8870m under Linux (at least not with the appropriate drivers), I want to switch it off permanently. For some reason I could not get the script to run at boot time. So let's fire it up when logging in. First of all we need to allow users to use the script with out a sudo password:

Make a file graphics_switch_permission and fill it with:

Code:

ALL ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/graphics_switch

Change permissions and move it to the right place:

Code:

sudo chmod 0440 graphics_switch_permission
sudo mv graphics_switch_permission /etc/sudoers.d/

Now we can enter it to the startup applications. Type startup in the dash, click on Startup Applications and make a new entry for the script:

Code:

Name: switch 8870m off
Command: sleep 2 && sudo graphics_switch OFF

Log out and log in and you're done. With dimmed screen and only WIFI on, it shows an estimated runtime of 10:00 to 11:00 hours! What a difference it makes.

There are some corrections to the first post, the most important one being: Make the grub script executable!

Code:

sudo chmod a+x /etc/grub.d/30_windows

This error took me some five hours to figure out when I reinstalled Ubuntu. Stupid me. Other not so important corrections I will edit in later.

 

I just read this guide but I have heard there are several problems with Samsung laptops and them bricking after attempting to boot linux (UEFI memory overflowing). I was just wondering if you guys know anything about this and if there is already a fix which you have implemented into your guide or you just didn't run into the problem. I have wanted to install linux on this laptop for quite a while but I haven't taken the risk as it risks bricking your device permanently.

Thanks in advance,

Tom

 

So far we have not seen any reports of UEFI related bricking on 2013 models, only 2012 models. You can read more about the issue in the sticky thread linked below:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/706510-samsung-laptops-bricked-using-uefi.html

 

I have samsung NP870Z5E with the amd 8850M, is it possible to turn off the discrete gpu?

Thanks

 

Wow, very nice thread! Might give linux a shot .

 

I've created this thread because I had much problems and I want to share and archive the solutions.
First I can't recommend you to install Ubuntu 13.04 if you want to turn off dedicated GPU because that's very buggy.
I can suggest you to use Ubuntu 12.04 and this guide will mainly be about this version of ubuntu.

I'll add more if I have more fixes but that's all I'm currently using.

Touchpad Scrolling
During installation and on first boot you won't be able to scroll with the touchpad. That's the easiest problem to fix. Just run update manager and install latest kernel

turn off dedicated GPU(AMD 8870M)
Since I couldn't get any of the amd drivers recognize the dedicated gpu and I don't want to waste battery life I thought it would be the best to disable it.
1) install the acpi_call module as described on this page: http://hybrid-graphics-linux.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Acpi_call
2) set the module for autoload by putting it's name into /etc/modules. you can use this command to do that:

Code:

sudo echo acpi_call >> /etc/modules

3) open /etc/rc.local as root with your favourite editor(nano or gedit) and add this line just before "exit 0":

Code:

echo '\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._OFF' > /proc/acpi/call

this will turn off the dedicated gpu on boot. However I saw, that this breaks standby sometimes and even if not after resume the gpu will be active again. To fix it we turn on the gpu before going to sleep and turn it off again after resume.
To do this just create the file /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_amd-switch with the following content:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
    hibernate|suspend)
        echo '\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._ON' > /proc/acpi/call
	rfkill block bluetooth
        ;;

    thaw|resume)
        echo '\_SB.PCI0.PEG0.PEGP._OFF' > /proc/acpi/call
	echo 1 > /proc/easy_backlight
        ;;

    *)
        ;;
esac
exit $?

Screen Resolution
for my use the screen resolution of 1920x1080 is way too much for 15.6 inch but the next 16:9 resolution is 1360x768 so I've added support for a new resolution. I use 1440x810.
1) generate Modeline

Code:

gtf 1440 810 60

2) create the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-monitor.conf with the following contents:

Code:

Section "Device"
	Identifier "v"
    	Driver     "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Monitor[0]"
	Modeline "1440x810_60.00"  95.04  1440 1512 1664 1888  810 811 814 839  -HSync +Vsync
	Option "PreferredMode" "1440x810_60.00"
EndSection


Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device "vesa"
	Monitor "Monitor[0]"
EndSection

Please make sure to replace the resolution and the Modeline if you prefer another resolution. You also can add multiple Modeline's.
Now logout and then login or restart your computer and you should be able to select the new resolution now.

Function Keys
1) follow the section "Function keys" on this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SamsungSeries9
2) install samsung tools:

Code:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:voria/ppa
sudo apt-get install samsung-tools samsung-laptop

3) open "Samsung Tools Preferences" and set backlight,bluetooth,webcam to none, CPUfan to Fn+F8 and Wireless to Fn+F9
4) download kbbcontrol and kbbnotify from my attachments and extract the files to /opt
5) set the permissions:

Code:

sudo chmod +xs /opt/kbbcontrol
sudo chmod +x /opt/kbbnotify

6) install and open compiz config manager and add the following commands and assign them to the fn keys:

Code:

/opt/kbbcontrol down
/opt/kbbcontrol up

 

Thank you for the guide. Will it work with amd 8850m?

I will test it tonight when I come home.

Regards

 

I think so because the switch-off works via acpi. You don't even need to install a amd driver.
However it would be great if you(or someone else) finds a way to enable the amd gpu because I couldn't get the opensource or the proprietary driver working with 8870M.

 

Hi M1cha, thank you for sharing this guide.

I want to mention that there is another recent thread about installing Ubuntu on the 2013 Series 7 -- most models of which are practically identical to the Ativ Book 8 covered here.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/723676-linux-series-7-2013-a.html

I can offer to merge the two threads if you want?

We do not have a lot of Linux discussion here on the Samsung forum, and I would think consolidating discussions about Linux on NP770/780/870/880 models would help keep the combined thread higher on the list, so it doesn't scroll into oblivion. We could even rename it to specifically mention those models (assuming Lekkerkerker, the OP of that other thread, agrees).

Please consider this as merely a suggestion and an offer from your friendly neighborhood moderator

 

hi and nice thread. I have a ATIV book 8.
about the windows8 boot fix: you can use ubuntu boot repair for that. You don't need to manually fix it then bout

about easy_slowdown_manager: for me it says:

Does ATIV book 8 use another way to control these thing or do they just use another signature/address?

 

Merging wouldn't be that good because it seems there are differents between serie7chronos2013 and ativbook8 because some of his guides don't work for me.

 

I got it working. The problem was that I selected "UEFI OS" instead of "CSM and UEFI OS" in BIOS.

 

Actually there are almost only cosmetic and name differences between Ativ Book 8 (NP870/880) and the 2013 Series 7 (NP770/780) -- as has been discussed ad nauseam in the Owners Lounge and Intro threads for those models (linked below) and numerous other threads this summer:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...unge-np770z5e-np780z5e-np870z5e-np880z5e.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/702308-introducing-2013-series-7-chronos-amd-hd8870m.html

Lekkerkerker's NP770Z5E is a non-touch model, whereas yours may be touch (I don't know your model number). Also, you may have different amounts of RAM and different GPUs (8870 vs 8770) -- but that is true even among different Ativ Book 8 models. The main difference between the two model series is the change in color and the new branding.

But it's your thread and entirely up to you. I merely thought it might help keep and promote traffic to have a consolidated Linux thread.

 

yep you're right, sry
I thought that because samsung-tools didn't work for me but it was just a wrong bios setting.

You can merge it if you want.

 

I've merged the two threads and edited the thread title to mention both the 2013 Series 7 and the Ativ Book 8.

John

 

Has anyone succeeded in dual booting Linux Mint and Windows? I have the NP770, and I want it to dual boot Windows and Mint. I can get Mint to install, but the Windows Boot Manager doesn't see it at startup. Have ploughed through the Mint forums, and tried numerous suggestions using EasyBCD, but no joy. I'm at the point of depair, but I would really like to try Mint as an alternative to Windows...

 

Sounds a bit like the problem we're discussing here. Did you change UEFI settings in order to install Mint?

 

Hi, thank you for the reply. From what I have read on other forums, Mint will boot either EFI or BIOS. For it to work with Win 8, it must boot EFI (although I tried both ways before I found that out!), so I set OS Mode to UEFI for the install. I read in another forum that existence of an EFI folder in /boot when Mint has been installed confirms that it was an EFI install, and i have that.

 

Got it. I cannot speak to the Linux/Mint side myself, hopefully others will jump in. If your disk is GPT (as it will have been from the factory if the PC was delivered with Win8) then you definitely need to stay in UEFI mode (as it also will have been from factory). Alternatively, you can convert the disk to MBR and switch to CSM (BIOS) mode -- but this will lose everything on the disk, and you will have to re-install Windows (and of course Mint).

And that's pretty much as as deep as I should venture into this, as I really don't know much about Linux

 

I installed the latest 3.11 kernel from ubuntu kernel-ppa on my 12.04 system and I'm stunned.
Suspend, resume and hibernate are working without any problems now and very fast(2-4s).
I can't wait for the final version of 3.11 kernel because there are some little problems(cpufreq not working).

 

Sorry to revive this thread, but i want to buy an NP870. Also i want to run the Radeon under linux.
The latest AMD Beta Driver lists the 8870m as supported.
Could someone check that driver out?

 

Hello folks,

i was wondering if this guide

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

can help me installing ubuntu on series 7 NP700Z5C-S03(IT). The problem is that i saw this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/706510-samsung-laptops-bricked-using-uefi.html and bad thoughts started to occur

 

You would have noticed that the bricking thread has gone much quieter during 2013.

I think that's the result of Samsung fixing the BIOS issues and Linux improving UEFI and SecureBoot compatibility.

John

 

Hi,
I'm new on notebookreview. I'm interested about this laptop and installing Linux on it. I search a lot, but never found success stories about using Radeon 8870HD, Linux and its official drivers, provided from AMD.

Is there someone knows something about that?

Bye.


EDIT: sorry for my poor English... I'm Italian ;-)

 

If you Google for "site: Samsung Notebook Forum Linux" then you will find a few hits relating to Linux. Some are in the owners' lounge for your model.

John