Linux Mint on Chuwi Hi10 & Hi12 Tablets

[Jerror]

I don’t know about the Plus, but all of the above works with the Pro. The tablets are adjacent in their series and nearly identical so it’s reasonable to hope the experience will be similar.

On the Pro:  Linuxium’s respin should install however Ubuntu does, straight to disk. I wiped the whole drive for stock arch linux, works fine except no audio battery & backlight, and wifi & touchscreen drivers need to be installed manually (and a BIOS setting flipped for wifi), and the latest kernel which works is 4.9 (on arch, install the “linux-lts” packages instead of “linux”). MicroSD is hit or miss; Sandisk didn’t work for me, and 128gb support is choppy (fails to mount on boot) but the situation has been improving (since 4.9 I’ve been able to get the card to mount be reinserting until it succeeds, beforehand I had to reboot). I haven’t tried putting Windows back on. There’s no special steps to follow, it works just like a laptop — especially since you don’t care to save the remix/windows partitions.

Thanks for the link to the hi10pro kernel config! Seems there’s a patch to fix the no-video bug in recent kernels, and even better it seems in the latest rc the patch is unnecessary — and battery monitoring works! I have the Z8300 model and the repository is for the Z8350 model, but the differences are trivial so I’m hopeful. I’ll give it a shot and report back.

[Jerror]

IT WORKS! I built https://github.com/danielotero/linux-on-hi10 (kernel 4.12-rc6 configured for the Z8350 Hi10 Pro) on my Z8300 Hi10 Pro and it went off without a hitch. Got video, backlight control, battery monitoring, and wifi OOTB. Kernel took about 6.5 hours to build; I had to do it from tty so that the additional drain of gnome wouldn’t overpower the charger. Here’re the compiled packages, for all you impatient Archers:

linux-hi10-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

linux-hi10-headers-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

linux-hi10-docs-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

After nearly a year, my tablet is finally convenient for regular use 😀

[Brad]

Jerror wrote:

IT WORKS! I built https://github.com/danielotero/linux-on-hi10 (kernel 4.12-rc6 configured for the Z8350 Hi10 Pro) on my Z8300 Hi10 Pro and it went off without a hitch. Got video, backlight control, battery monitoring, and wifi OOTB. Kernel took about 6.5 hours to build; I had to do it from tty so that the additional drain of gnome wouldn’t overpower the charger. Here’re the compiled packages, for all you impatient Archers: linux-hi10-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz linux-hi10-headers-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz linux-hi10-docs-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz After nearly a year, my tablet is finally convenient for regular use

What about the touchscreen?  I thought the Goodix driver would be available and working by now?

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[Jerror]

It’s not yet in the kernel (ie., 4.12-rc6) but practically that’s no problem. The driver is quick&easy to build and install. And compared to the nigh necessity of OOTB wifi and battery, touchscreen would only be ‘nice’.

I didn’t check for error messages involving the touchscreen after installing the kernel, by the way; it just didn’t work, so I installed and enabled it as per usual. Was Goodix support expected?

[evalsindro]

The driver is quick&easy to build and install

where can i find these instructions and source? thx

[Jerror]

Here: https://github.com/onitake/gslx680-acpi

You’ll need the firmware silead_ts.fw from https://github.com/onitake/gsl-firmware/tree/master/firmware/chuwi/hi10_pro

Copy the firmware to /lib/firmware/silead_ts.fw then build and install the gslx680 driver (make; sudo make install). Load the driver module (modprobe gslx680_ts_acpi) and you should have a working touchscreen. The module ought to load automatically on boot. You’ll have to rebuild the driver every time you upgrade the kernel, but it builds instantaneously so that’s no issue. Firmware and instructions courtesy of angellsl10, he provided them earlier in this thread.

[Anonymous]

Will this also work on the Hi12, please?

Or only the Hi10-Plus?

Thanks!

[GenZ]

Jerror wrote:

IT WORKS! I built https://github.com/danielotero/linux-on-hi10 (kernel 4.12-rc6 configured for the Z8350 Hi10 Pro) on my Z8300 Hi10 Pro and it went off without a hitch. Got video, backlight control, battery monitoring, and wifi OOTB. Kernel took about 6.5 hours to build; I had to do it from tty so that the additional drain of gnome wouldn’t overpower the charger. Here’re the compiled packages, for all you impatient Archers: linux-hi10-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz linux-hi10-headers-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz linux-hi10-docs-4.12-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz After nearly a year, my tablet is finally convenient for regular use

Right now i’m using linux mint cinnamon on my Hi10 Plus.  Do you know how can i make this kernel work on it?

 

[Jerror]

I don’t know, I don’t have a Hi10 Plus, but the latest kernel in arch testing (4.12.2-1) works just as well as the custom hi10pro kernel above sans backlight control. I think it’s likely that if you build the customized kernel above (or even just install the packages I linked) it’ll work on the Plus just fine, but they’re packaged for the Arch Build System / pacman. It’d be far easier to just install whatever 4.12 kernel is available in the Linux Mint repositories; you ought to get battery monitoring, OOTB wifi and a more stable system overall. Maybe try out Linuxium’s latest Ubuntu LiveUSB; I never got around to it but it’s 4.12-based so it should let you test the new functionality.

[GenZ]

Jerror wrote:

I don’t know, I don’t have a Hi10 Plus, but the latest kernel in arch testing (4.12.2-1) works just as well as the custom hi10pro kernel above sans backlight control. I think it’s likely that if you build the customized kernel above (or even just install the packages I linked) it’ll work on the Plus just fine, but they’re packaged for the Arch Build System / pacman. It’d be far easier to just install whatever 4.12 kernel is available in the Linux Mint repositories; you ought to get battery monitoring, OOTB wifi and a more stable system overall. Maybe try out Linuxium’s latest Ubuntu LiveUSB; I never got around to it but it’s 4.12-based so it should let you test the new functionality.

 

Thanks for your advice. I’ve upgrade the kernel from 4.8 to 4.12 and as you said, I have the battery indicator, power button and touchscreen (with the gslx680 driver and silead_ts.fw firmware that you’ve posted above) working without issues. But there’s some things that i would like to fix.

– Before updating the kernel i installed this wifi driver (https://github.com/apinela/rtl8723bs) with which i could scan all the near networks but when i tried to connect to my network  it’s stayed on “connecting” (I also enabled SDIO Support – PCI Mode on BIOS).  After upgrade the kernel this issue is still there however, i can use a external wifi or pair the bluetooth without any problems.

– I would also like to be able to change the brightness level.  With xbacklight any changes that i made have no effect and with xrandr i got a error “need crtc to set gamma on” so none works. What else should i try?

 

After all i think i might make a fresh linux install and after that upgrading the kernel.

 

[Brad]

If i’m not mistaken, you should get better performance using the XFCE or Mate desktops than with Cinnamon, which would be my choice on the relatively slower Atom CPU.

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[Brad]

Jerror wrote:

I wiped the whole drive for stock arch linux, works fine except no audio battery & backlight, and wifi & touchscreen drivers need to be installed manually

Kernel 4.13 coming soon might fix the audio problem. I would keep an eye out for Linuxium updating his custom distro “isorespin” scripts to include it –> https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/linux-on-atom-based-devices/page/19/#post-69443

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[Yoghurt]

Audio itself is not broken on the Hi10 . I tried Headphones and they do work, bluetooth too, so its not an driver problem. Its a problem in the Alsa-UCM files (basically the mapping/routes), thats where our speaker mapping is broken and needs to be fixed.

Here is the relevant config which needs to be installed: https://github.com/plbossart/UCM/tree/master/bytcr-rt5651

Here is an GitHub issue about the rt5651 which is the audio hardware in our device. Maybe someone can work out a fix.

[el Salmon]

Yoghurt wrote:

Audio itself is not broken on the Hi10 . I tried Headphones and they do work, bluetooth too, so its not an driver problem. Its a problem in the Alsa-UCM files (basically the mapping/routes), thats where our speaker mapping is broken and needs to be fixed. Here is the relevant config which needs to be installed: https://github.com/plbossart/UCM/tree/master/bytcr-rt5651 Here is an GitHub issue about the rt5651 which is the audio hardware in our device. Maybe someone can work out a fix.

It seems we are close to get a fix. Did you try with the latest kernel (4.13-rc1) ?

[Yoghurt]

el Salmon wrote:

It seems we are close to get a fix. Did you try with the latest kernel (4.13-rc1) ?

 

Yes. Im on 4.13-rc1. Speakers do NOT work, but headphones do. I also got UCM files installed.

[Author]

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