Ubuntu on the Cube Thinker?

[Brad]

Humperdinck wrote:

…Personally I think the marriage of Ubuntu and cheap but not too cheap Chinese hardware is a match made in heaven.  I plan to never buy another over-priced MacBook.

The Cube Thinker (with the 3K screen and better memory than the Chuwi)  would be a more robust Linux machine and I can even imagine getting a VM running for any must have Windows or OS X software.  But I’d rather not spring for one only to find out WiFi is a no go.

So pretty please someone try it out?  And let’s do what we can to get manufacturers like this to start shipping with Linux pre-installed (instead of Chinese Windows, cmon that’s a no brainer) and advertising Linux compatibility…

“CHUWI LapBook 12.3 will first sell with Windows 10, and later the company plans to offer an Ubuntu version.” –> http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/04/27/chuwi-lapbook-12-3-is-a-windows-10-ubuntu-apollo-lake-laptop-with-a-2k-display-6gb-ram-up-to-256-gb-ssd-storage/
   Btw, I think the default desktop now going forward for Ubuntu is Gnome. If you want to squeeze out better performance, probably Mate, LXDE, or XFCE are the more lean/faster desktops.  So I personally would use Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu (XFCE).  Xubuntu is probably gonna be the best supported.  Also there is some advantages to going with a distro with “rolling release” so you can get the latest stable Kernel with bug fixes and best support of the newer hardware/devices and device drivers.
So Manjaro XFCE is a good choice for that and it seems to run OK from being installed onto and booted from a USB drive (ie, not installed onto the eMMC or SSD/HD) with full data persistence between boots.  But on some devices Manjaro won’t boot from the USB and get a black screen.  No report yet why it boots on some (eg. Chuwi Lapbook 14.1) but not on others.

more about me here

[Rob H]

Ubuntu 17.04 is running on my new Thinker.

I first checked out the live USB and saw a couple of issues: 1. no touchpad (i2c-SYNA3602:00 failed with error -61) and 2. similar fingerprint sensor failure (which I don’t really care about). I bought the laptop solely for Linux anyway so I installed over the existing Windows partitions.

Fixing the SYNA sensor issue and getting a working touchpad turned out to be easy. I just had to install the next Linux version (v4.11) from the kernel PPA.

[Humperdinck]

That’s exciting news.

So, just to confirm you have full functionality on the Cube Thinker running Ubuntu 17.04 with the upgraded kernel (v.4.11)?

How about suspend behavior/power management, any issues there?

It’d be great to hear your overall impressions of the hardware.  Think this will be my next everyday laptop and the Chuwi is likely to get benched.  It runs great but if I put it to sleep on battery the battery drains completely and grub gets corrupted (also, BIOS settings change, strangely enough, perhaps there’s no coin battery)  The Chuwi also feels a bit flimsy and this looks considerably more solid.  For the money the Chuwi is quite respectable but I’m happy to pay for the better screen/ram/built-in ssd.

Many thanks Rob for testing and posting!

And thanks Brad for the suggestions on lightweight variants, I’ll give them a spin, and for pointing out the new Chuwi 12.3, that looks like a big improvement.

 

[Garywzh]

I installed ubuntu gnome 17.04 on my thinker, and installed the new kernel 4.11.5, but the touchpad still not working, no touchpad detected

[Garywzh]

two problems here,

1. touchpad not working, even installed the latest kernel (4.11)
2. there is popping noise when start up / shut down. seems a snd-hda-intel issue

[treize]

Had my thinker for a few days now. So far installed Manjaro rolling and Ubuntu 17.04 on it. Both work really well, even HiDPI support is very good, except for the touchpad. I’ve looked around everywhere and tried kernel 4.12 for Manjaro and 4.11.0 for Ubuntu but it just won’t work. If someone did get it to work please let us know as my plan was to use this mainly for linux.

I’ve also encountered the audio popping noise. Under Manjaro it actually occurs periodically when no audio is being output, like two popping noises every few seconds, which is very annoying (i disabled the sound modules for this reason). On Ubuntu it seems to work better since it only happens once during startup. A hack for Manjaro that does work is to keep the sound settings dialog open in the background, then the popping noise will not occur anymore.

[Rob H]

Sorry, I don’t check in here often.

There’s a problem when resetting the touchpad device. Mine does it too on every boot now though I swear it once worked. I’ve found that modprobe -r i2c_hid && modprobe i2c_hid AFTER the first sleep and resume will prod it back into a working state. (Possibly remove the module before sleep, then load after resume.) From then on it works normally even through sleep.

When I dug deeper I saw a patch intended to fix a similar problem: ‘HID: i2c-hid: Add quirk for sleep before reset’. I only tried adjusting the usleep range but it didn’t help. For now I can live with the workaround and wait for someone to find a way to perform a reliable reset in i2c-hid.

[treize]

Rob H, I can’t thank you enough for this fix! I had found some fixes/patches about this as well and I knew the problem was probably with the i2c system but I didn’t honestly expect it to be worked around so easily. It works like a charm and I now have all the functionality I want under linux, awesome.

Edit: I spoke too soon. Clicking (either by tapping or using the touchpad buttons) doesn’t seem to work. This may just be due to some settings though. I’ve noticed if i keep the left button pressed and then slide across the pad it actuall scrolls in my browser, so it’s probably just misconfigured somehow.

[treize]

On a second attempt clicks are now working by tapping and two-finger tapping for right clicks. The physical buttons don’t seem to work (though the events seem to get through in /dev/input/eventXX) but that’s not a big problem for me.

[Lars Veldscholte]

Any luck with these issues?

I just put Antergos on my Cube Thinker and I have the two issues described above: the touchpad doesn’t work (the touchscreen does, however) and I have the annoying periodic popping noises.

In dmesg I find the following error about the touchpad:

[ 1050.583436] i2c_hid i2c-SYNA3602:00: failed to reset device.
[ 1056.769544] i2c_hid i2c-SYNA3602:00: failed to reset device.
[ 1062.956372] i2c_hid i2c-SYNA3602:00: failed to reset device.
[ 1069.143022] i2c_hid i2c-SYNA3602:00: failed to reset device.
[ 1070.156270] i2c_hid i2c-SYNA3602:00: can't add hid device: -61
[ 1070.156541] i2c_hid: probe of i2c-SYNA3602:00 failed with error -61

I’m running Linux 4.12. Removing and reloading the i2c kernel module (as described above) doesn’t have any effect.

Did you solve the popping noises?

[Garywzh]

No, I have not found any solution yet. And I have decided to switch back to windows, because

1. I found the performance of linux desktop distro is a lot worse compare to windows.

2. Google said they will not support video decode hardware accelerating in Chrome on linux, and I watch a lot youtube, so it is not cool for me.

[Lars Veldscholte]

Oh, too bad.

After a reboot the touchpad suddenly started working. Then, after another reboot, it did not work anymore. No idea what happened there.

In any case, ‘clicking’ the touchpad by pressing down doesn’t seem to work…

I did not find a solution yet for the popping noise, other than disabling sound altogether by removing snd-hda-intel. What is interesting is that the popping did not occur in the installer (live CD) of Antergos, but it did after installing.

EDIT: The popping noise was caused by the power saving mode of snd-hda-intel. The solution was to disable sound power saving in /etc/default/tlp. More info: https://askubuntu.com/questions/457910/strange-noise-in-headphones-when-no-sound-is-played

The only issue left is the hardware button of the touchpad. I can click using the touchpad by tapping on it, but pressing it physically down to click does not work. I think the buttons are not recognised.

[Brad]

One guy with the same touchpad problem on a T-bao Tbook Air (same CPU and touchpad) using the Manjaro distro says he found a workaround detailed here. The discussion thread also covers how he got past installation/booting issue(s).

more about me here

[Lars Veldscholte]

Fortunately, I didn’t have any installation issues.

I don’t really get what the workaround is supposed to be; his post is kinda hard to read.

The workaround I currently use is to rmmod the i2c module, sleep and resume, then modprobe it again. Not sure why but that enables the touchpad, until reboot at least. The physical button (press down) still doesn’t work though.

[treize]

I found that you don’t actually have to go in sleep to get the touchpad working again most of the time. What works fairly reliably for me is to run the rmmod with the modprobe in one command, and while the command is running (presumably its then in the module initialization part) you tap or click. Usually the command returns then like it recognizes incoming data from the touchpad and it’ll work again. In the beginning I also just ran the command and waited for it to return and it didn’t work most of the time, until I learned this trick. Hope it helps.

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