Recently I became a (not very proud) owner of Acer Aspire Switch 10E, a small notebook/tablet convertible based on Intel baytrail platform. Replacing preinstalled (32-bit!) Windows 8.1 with (64-bit) openSUSE proved more challenging than expected, mostly because the device is haunted by a 32-bit UEFI so that it took me a week to make it boot without an external USB flash disk.
Even today, a lot of issues persist. As I do not want to waste a (partially) good hardware, I would like to make it as usable as possible. This is much less selfish than it sounds as there are many other devices based on Intel baytrail platform so that the effort is going to help their owners as well (if successful, that is).
Most pressing issues:
- kernel needs to be built with CONFIG_EFI_MIXED enabled to be able to interact with 32-bit UEFI properly (enabled now in recent openSUSE kernels)
- grub2 needs a commit from mainline to use i386-efi target when needed (available in home:mkubecek:baytrail OBS project, going to submit)
- UEFI seems to keep resetting EFI variables to point to the original location of the windows EFI loader; find if it can be persuaded not to or at least to accept other loader as fallback if that one doesn't exist
- Realtek 8723BS wi-fi adapter is not supported by mainline kernel; there is an out-of-tree driver available; according to Larry Finger, the chances of it getting it into mainline are negligible but there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel; for the time being, a KMP with the driver from github would be handy
- the keyboard/touchpad device in the base needs HID_MAX_USAGES to be raised to an insanely high value; according to Jiří Kosina, this usually means the device reports too many capabilities (without actually providing those); a proper way to handle this is writing a driver which fixes the descriptor (there is also a table of HID device quirks, could it be employed instead?).
- there definitely is a sound device inside; however, none is detected by openSUSE or seen by lspci or lsusb; I guess it uses some more esoteric interface ({SD,MM,GP}IO?); learn more about those and try to find a way to
- suspend to disk/RAM doesn't work at all
- since 4.3.0 (persists with 4.4-rc4), playing fullscreen video in mpv ends up freezing the system; trying to get a crash dump but Alt-SysRq-C is ignored and automatic lockup detectors reboot the system instead of executing kdump for some reason
- getting "Atomic update failure on pipe A" errors from i915 driver; these seem to be fixed for Haswell GPU's but apparently this Atom APU is also affected
- when the lid is taken out of the base for long time (1-2 hours), USB sometime stops working; occasionally a message about IRQ#8 being disabled appears; last seen with 4.1 kernel, not sure if this issue can be reproduced with current kernel (haven't tried).
- rotating the screen in Plasma 5 is way slower than it used to be in KDE4
- touchscreen tap leads to completely different action than a mouse click when Plasma 5 desktop is displayed; may be intentional but I have no idea how to configure it
Looking for hackers with the skills:
This project is part of:
Hack Week 13
Activity
Comments
-
about 9 years ago by mkubecek | Reply
End of hackweek status: I spent a lot of time on trying to get a crash dump after video playback freezes. No luck so far - and I didn't get to some other interesting topics (like getting rid of the
HID_MAX_USAGES
hack).- ToDo: grub2 submitrequest
- UEFI ignores BootOrder but one can select his preferred EFI loader in the setup
- packaged rtl8723bs KMP and added to home:mkubecek:baytrail OBS project; ToDo: check status of the additional patches in
patches/
subdirectory - keyboard/touchpad usages issue: still ToDo
- enabling few additional config options allows me to see the sound device; no success to get an actual sound out of it yet, will need to get more familiar with ALSA configuration
- suspend to disk/RAM: no progress
- freezing video: spent a lot of time trying to get a crash dump, no success
- atomic update failures: modified the workaround for freedesktop.org bug 91579 to be used with ValleyView chipsets but the messages are still there; ToDo: report a bug to bugs.freedesktop.org
- IRQ getting disabled:
irqpoll
kernel parameter seems to help - with current Tumbleweed, screen rotation is as fast as it used to be with KDE4
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Project Description
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Goal for this Hackweek
New welcome app, possibly with EOL notification for Leap.
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YQPkg - Bringing the Single Package Selection Back to Life by shundhammer
tl;dr
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See section "Result" at the bottom for the current status after the hack week.
Current Status
See the development status issue at the GitHub repo.
tl;dr: It's usable now with all the key features.
It does real package installation / removal / update with reasonable user feedback.
The Past and the Present
We used to have and still have a powerful software selection with the YaST sw_single module (and the YaST patterns counterpart): You can select software down to the package level, you can easily select one of many available package versions, you can select entire patterns - or just view them and pick individual packages from patterns.
You can search packages based on name, description, "requires" or "provides" level, and many more things.
The Future
YaST is on its way out, to be replaced by the new Agama installer and Cockpit for system administration. Those tools can do many things, but fine-grained package selection is not among them. And there are also no other Open Source tools available for that purpose that even come close to the YaST package selection.
Many aspects of YaST have become obsolete over the years; many subsystems now come with a good default configuration, or they can configure themselves automatically. Just think about sound or X11 configuration; when did you last need to touch them?
For others, the desktops bring their own tools (e.g. printers), or there are FOSS configuration tools (NetworkManager, BlueMan). Most YaST modules are no longer needed, and for many others there is a replacement in tools like Cockpit.
But no longer having a powerful fine-grained package selection like in YaST sw_single will hurt. Big time. At least until there is an adequate replacement, many users will want to keep it.
The Idea
YaST sw_single always revolved around a powerful high-level widget on the abstract UI level. Libyui has low-level widgets like YPushButton, YCheckBox, YInputField, more advanced ones like YTable, YTree; and some few very high-level ones like YPackageSelector and YPatternSelector that do the whole package selection thing alone, working just on the libzypp level and changing the status of packages or patterns there.
For the YaST Qt UI, the YQPackageSelector / YQPatternSelector widgets work purely on the Qt and libzypp level; no other YaST infrastructure involved, in particular no Ruby (or formerly YCP) interpreter, no libyui-level widgets, no bindings between Qt / C++ and Ruby / YaST-core, nothing. So it's not too hard to rip all that part out of YaST and create a standalone program from it.
For the NCurses UI, the NCPackageSelector / NCPatternSelector create a lot of libyui widgets (inheriting YWidget / NCWidget) and use a lot of libyui calls to glue them together; and all that of course still needs a lot of YaST / libyui / libyui-ncurses infrastructure. So NCurses is out of scope here.
Preparatory Work: Initializing the Package Subsystem
To see if this is feasible at all, the existing UI examples needed some fixing to check what is needed on that level. That was the make-or-break decision: Would it be realistically possible to set the needed environment in libzypp up (without being stranded in the middle of that task alone at the end of the hack week)?
Yes, it is: That part is already working:
https://github.com/yast/yast-ycp-ui-bindings/pull/71
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Description
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Goals
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Resources
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Description
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Goals
Finalize existing two digital art wallpapers for Leap and Tumbleweed https://github.com/openSUSE/branding/issues/155 Make them available as part of leap16 dir in https://github.com/openSUSE/wallpapers and update (This makes is available to Tumbleweed users as well). Update https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/X11:common:Factory/wallpapers-openSUSE-extra && Leap:16.0 && Factory.
Resources
https://github.com/openSUSE/branding/issues/155 The mauritius draft can be found in https://github.com/lkocman/geo-wallpapers