Linux on my Netbook

Back to Linux and the GMA 500 driver problem

 

When Windows 8 came out, I was happy to test out and upgrade the Windows 7 installation on my Asus T91MT. It was OK in the beginning, but the GMA 500 drivers were unsupported on Windows 8. This showed up in day-to-day use. IE used to frequently crash, and the display went black for umpteen number of times when I was doing something important. This was fine in the beginning, but even after many updates to Windows 8 this problem never got resolved. Finally, I discovered that Intel has stopped further development of GMA 500 drivers, and the Windows 7 drivers would be the last one out.

 

With that, I though that it is good time to revisit Linux. This was not the first time I tried Linux on T91. I had done this before, but the state of GMA 500 drivers on Linux has been ever worse. There has not been a supported opensource driver for this quite powerful GPU, because of the "closed" nature of the hardware chipset itself. Ubuntu 13.04 (and its other lighter derivatives: Xubuntu and Mint Linux) with the updated Kernel (3.3.x or higher) has drivers written by Alan Cox that give out-of-box descent graphics support for the GPU. Still, the support is far from optimal, and there is no indication that the situation is going to get better. In any case, I decided to install Xubuntu (and then Mint Linux) on T91 about a month ago. This weblog enlists my experience in using Linux on my T91.

(For the aficionados: I refer to Linux and the Linux distributions - Xubuntu or Mint Linux - interchangeably in this post.)

 

Why did I actually switch to Xubuntu from Windows 8?

 

Simple: I am going to buy a new Windows 8 tablet, with newer hardware (read better touch screen, better processor). Not so soon, but eventually will ;)

 

 

The basics: Netbook, can I browse the net?

 

When the Netbooks came out, one of the basic functions they were supposed to do effortlessly was browse the Internet, and along side provide some basic PC functionalities. Looking back, I think, this promise never worked out, and Apple with its iPad showed just how that experience should be. 

 

Xubuntu comes installed with Firefox. It works great, I never had much complains about Firefox, except its UI feels heavy. So the next browser choice was: Chromium.

The browser of my choice: Chromium 

Chromium worked great till someone send me an Youtube, that I quickly wanted to watch .. no Flash plugin in Ubuntu! And I thought Youtube was all HTML 5. But apparently it is not, at least not yet. The biggest let down is that none of the live streams works without Flash. And so I visited Adobe site to install the latest Flash player. And I am informed that Flash is no longer under active development for Linux! What?! Ok I know Flash is kind of dead, but still.

So, I reluctantly switched to Chrome (the browser that I generally avoid). Here, Youtube "works", but it is choppy video, the incomplete GMA 500 drivers shows up its inability to render video here. But there other problems: after doing some investigation I found that XOrg process seems to consume one HT core (the T91 has Atom Z20, that has two HT cores), for apparently no reason. This is either a problem with XOrg, or as result of GMA 500 driver being not able to support some operation (again due to closed source nature!), which are then emulated by the CPU. But all this actually kills the experience of browsing the net on the netbook. At the end of this I still felt as if IE10 with the unsupported GMA 500 on Windows 8 performed far better (not sure how IE 10 fares on Win 7, with official GMA 500 drivers though).


Music: The ogg codec

Ever after the Flash exception, I still didn't want to install any thing that is not opensource. So I though it would be good to convert some of my music files to ogg and use it on my Netbook. I think ogg is a fairly good format to compete with MP3, but compared to MP4 (audio), ogg is far inferior as far as the file sizes go (some times you may get as much as 5-6 times lower file size with mp4-audio as compared to ogg). Due to the state of the GMA 500 driver, I didn't even bother to check how video works.


Office application: Not much

Now a days I hardly use office. Most of my work gets done via Python / R. When I need office, I use my reliable desktop (yes I still use a desktop), which runs on Windows 8.


Occasional Work:

For me this is terminal, vi, Emacs, browser, compiler, and interpreter .. and all are there on Linux!


Overall

One thing: if the GMA 500 drivers were complete, Linux on this machine is just superb (consumes less disk, and offers far more than a vanilla Windows installation). In the end however, I may switch back to Win 7, or try out the new Xubuntu when it is released his October.
 

Random thought

iPad craze, and my Asus T91MT

Well the media is all praises over how "revolutionary" the iPad is. But for me it is a no sell, primarily because it is a consumer device: a device for consuming content and less of creating content. By content I mean write applications, not just make documents. There are other things that no one has bothered to check:

- For a tablet of this size, don't you expect to have handwriting recognition? Hey but iPad has a capacitive touch screen so that probably will not work.

- Does it have palm rejection? No one seems to say anything about this.

- Then there are a whole lot of other things: no multi-task, no web cam etc. etc. that many others have pointed out as obvious omission.

For me the Asus T91MT, that I have been using has all of this. Though it is not all good with palm rejection; it only works well with Microsoft Journal. I heavily depend on the Windows 7 handwriting recognition and has become my primary means of entering notes or writing lots of text; it just works for me. And it has a inbuilt physical keypad, in case you need one (write code?!). I have not yet tried programming on T91MT, but would do so soon ;-)

In any case it depends what you are looking for: if you want a fine balance between productivity and entertainment go for a tablet like Asus T91MT which has an integrated physical keypad. If you are looking for mostly an entertainment centric and content consumption device with which you would also like to get some productivity you might think of getting an iPad. Both of these, I guess, cost almost the same.

Experiences: My first convertible, Asus T91MT

Ok, I was going to type the title of this post as “Experiences: My first tablet”. But then realized that, I in-fact have a tablet: Mobilis, even before I got myself a Netbook (MiLeap). That is partly because I don't like laptops: primarily because of their form factors and secondarily because of the price factor (they were too expensive back then, well still are!).

This made me first buy the Mobilis. However that experience was not exactly pleasing. I am still trying to figure out how best to use this device!

Then I got HCL-MiLeap-L. Which was a terrific machine. But when Windows 7 was released, I really missed the touch feature. So I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on this kid and gave it to my parents as a backup machine for Skype call in event of power failure (the primary desktop running Windows 7).

In the mean time I got an office laptop (Dell XPS). Though pretty good performance (well good for doing some serious work!), it has two major problems: Weight and Heat. Either of these makes the device not so mobile. Also even if Windows 7 is there on this machine, there is no touch screen. To be fair, I was looking for a very portable, light weights, not to expensive machine that I owned ;)

I have been searching for this kind of a device for couple of months, and finally zeroed in onto Asus T91mt (or its successor T101mt). But eventually decided not to wait for the successor and ordered one from techbuy.com.au (who, I guess is fairly good online retailers/ re-seller, that is my experience). Prime reason for that being that there is no public set release date for T101mt, and there is no concrete info on if this will sport an SSD or an HDD. I really did not want to get an HDD based device. For MiLeap too I wanted an SSD based model, but they were simply out of stock when I ordered one.

I don’t intend to write a technical review of this product here, but just my experience of using this, in short it has been fantastic as of now.

So what do I use this device for: every thing except for serious programming. My “every thing” doesn’t include playing games or watching high-definition videos.

The best way I like to use this device is in tablet mode specifically to read news and stuff. Touch typing is accurate and handwriting recognition is terrific (of Windows 7), it also correct spelling mistakes on the fly ;) Multi-touch (two point) is also pretty accurate and works flawlessly for me.

The keyboard design is pretty good (if I compare this to MiLeap, which was quite cramped).

Heat generation is “very low”. I have a feeling that it is better than my Mobilis, which at some point got so hot that I could not hold it.

There are no fans! So it is very quite, and I am quite happy about this.

The bundled software (Windows 7 with the touch pack) and Asus touch suite are pretty good. Though I found Asus touch suite to be bit buggy and unstable some times, hope they fix it.

As far as the windows experience index goes it is 1.9, the lowest one going to the processor. (Note: I upgraded the memory to 2GB, though the default 1GB is usable, I simply always have too many apps open when it comes to a desktop operating system ;)…).

Finally, this need not be mentioned, but MeTA Studio works pretty well on this device. And drawing molecules with fingers is pretty intuitive (but buggy, so expect a fix, now since I know what happens!) ;) In any case, MeTA Studio is not multi-touch capable (yet).

Update: After constantly using it for few days I have made the following changes-

- Removed all Asus applications except Hotkey, I don't see they are really useful and I find Microsoft touch pack to be much more stable and usable than Asus applications. Also the Asus applications simply make the machine too slow.

- And installed them again! after realizing that merely changing power settings to 'high power' makes it faster.

- Removed the super hybrid engine too and put the power options to High performance. With this T91 performs way much smoother even in the tablet mode. The heat is not much of an issue still. Though battery life could be, have to see how it goes.

- Installed Google chrome. But it does not support some cool finger gestures like kinetic or hold and scroll. IE is still integrated well with the touch gestures. (moved to firefox, much better integration with windows 7)

- With this (expensive ?) purchase, I plan to buy no further gadgets for next 2 years, at least ;)

Update2

One of the commentors requested me to check pressure sensitivity with Open Canvas. As far as I can see, yes there is pressure sensitivity.

Update3

I have been using One Note (2007) on my T91MT for quite a while now, specifically to quickly write design documents and record memos. And I find it to be quite usable and very productive.

Eee of Tablet

Asus Eee T101MT. Unless some one comes with a superior model, I plan to get one of these as soon as it is available:

http://www.liliputing.com/2010/01/asus-eee-pc-t101mt-10-inch-tablet-coming-this-year.html

and ditch my heavy laptop, for ever. Well, as far as mobility is concerned. I will still use it at office ;-)

I really hope that they are fast enough to introduce it in Oz as well, given that they have already cleared FCC.

Update:

- I also found out Lenovo s10-3t

- But I also found another interesting thing, the Pinetrail processor GPU GMA 3150 is apparently less capable than the GPU used with Asus T91 MT which is GMA 500 .. Also T91 MT is mere 960 grams. Makes me think if the older version is better for me !