[Michael]

Things are improving a lot this year.

Yes that’s true from the research I’ve done online. It’s definitely not going to be a Jumper though. I put up with that trampoline of a keyboard because I was desperate for a 1080p screen. This year, there’s a lot more models with 1080p screens so I might go with a Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 since it appears to have a better keyboard/quality than the other models.
EDIT: Actually, I’m going to wait and see the review of the Jumper Ezbook Pro & the Teclast X3 Plus. The fact that they have full metal builds and 6 gigabytes of RAM is enough for me to wait. I suppose I’ll use an old laptop in the meantime.

[Michael]

Maybe I was unlucky. But this laptop doesn’t have a SATA port so the only way I can repair it is if I bust out the soldering iron. I guess I’ll only buy laptops that are easy to repair.

[Michael]

"Load optimized defaults" might break your EZBook 2

[Michael]

Ricardo Simões wrote:

Hello again people Please forgive me, I don’t mean to hijack this thread but I decided to try one last time to revive my “dead” Jumper EzBook 2 by flashing its BIOS, and I’m about to order the necessary hardware to do it, but I don’t know if I need a 1.8v converter or not… I posted on this thread https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/bios-cmos-reset/page/5/ over a week asking for help but no one answered Does anyone here knows if the EzBook 2 BIOS chip needs a 1.8v converter or not? Many thanks in advance for your trouble

 

This guy unbricked his laptop with programmer ch341a: https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/bios-cmos-reset/page/2/#post-54679

Apparently you don’t even need to purchase anything to unbrick it: https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/bios-cmos-reset/page/3/#post-58235

[Michael]

I freaked out today thinking my emmc was dying (write performance was nearly 0 and dmesg gave errors), but I figured out that I had to trim it. Just run sudo fstrim / periodically to do that. It was my own stupidity but I figured I’d post it here in case no one has used an SSD before or has forgotten about trim.

[Michael]

As a side-note, brightness can be controlled via (kernel 4.8):

xdotool key –clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessUp
xdotool key –clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessDown

There reason I mention this is because it seems from what I read on the internet, a lot of baytrail/cherrytrail tablets/laptops don’t have brightness control.

[Michael]

Found this critical part in dmesg:

[ 1.219148] sdhci: Secure Digital Host Controller Interface driver
[ 1.219155] sdhci: Copyright(c) Pierre Ossman
[ 1.235285] mmc0: SDHCI controller on ACPI [80860F14:00] using ADMA
[ 1.247709] sdhci-acpi 80860F14:01: failed to setup card detect gpio
[ 1.252672] mmc1: SDHCI controller on ACPI [80860F14:01] using ADMA

 

[ 3.103124] i2c_designware 808622C1:06: I2C bus managed by PUNIT
[ 3.153059] usb 1-3.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32
[ 3.203055] i2c_designware 808622C1:06: punit semaphore timed out, resetting
[ 3.203076] i2c_designware 808622C1:06: PUNIT SEM: 2
[ 3.207891] i2c_designware 808622C1:06: couldn’t acquire bus ownership
[ 3.207937] i2c_designware: probe of 808622C1:06 failed with error -110

 

Sorry to spam this thread with my posts. I’ll try emailing David Box from Intel with a stack trace.

[Michael]

@BBaker: I installed the BCM43430 firmware in /lib/firmware/brcm/ and loaded brcmfmac module but nothing happend. Since it’s a SDIO device, it uses the SD card interface so I think we have to get the SD card reader working first. According to this [thread](https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/20), you have to probe SDIO devices using /sys/bus/sdio/devices/ (not lspci) and if there is nothing there, then the OS cannot see the SDIO device. There is nothing in that directory for me.

[Michael]

I found a workaround for the battery in this [bug report](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88471).

I can get the battery percentage on linux but it’s a really hacky method. I started with linux v4.4 in Manjaro Linux. I downloaded kernel v4.8-rc4 from github (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/releases). I outputted the kernel config to file by doing zcat /proc/config.gz > ~/Downloads/linux/.config and then I ran make olddefconfig inside ~/Downloads/linux. Then I ran make xconfig and I set the following options: http://imgur.com/a/tEDbx. Also, I2C_DESIGNWARE_BAYTRAIL needs to be set to N (or else the battery stats will not work). I then compiled the kernel, rebooted and ran the following script: https://github.com/tgharib/axpd to get the battery percentage. The i2cget call seems to crash the laptop ~1/16 times, so do not call it too many times per laptop session.

Also, before running the script you need to have i2cget installed. On Manjaro, run sudo pacman -S i2c-tools.

[Michael]

The wifi chip is a BCM4343SD. I extracted this from the Windows driver that came pre-installed:

BCM43XX_Service_DispName=”Broadcom 802.11 Network Adapter Driver”
BCM43XX_DiskName=”802.11 Network Adapter Install Disk”
BCMH43XX_Service_DispName=”Broadcom 802.11 USB Network Adapter Driver”
BCM435SD_DeviceDesc=”Broadcom 802.11ac WDI SDIO Adapter”
BCM4343SD_DeviceDesc=”Broadcom 802.11n Wireless SDIO Adapter” <– text from device manager
BCMSDH43XX_Service_DispName=”Broadcom 802.11 SDIO Network Adapter Driver”

[Michael]

Sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead anyone about the touchpad… Multi-touch (only multi-touch – no single-touch) on the touchpad was/is working on my ezbook 2 and I assumed it was because I had played with the kernel config options. But I realized after that multi-touch (tap three fingers on the touchpad and the start menu will appear) on the laptop was always working even by default on the Manjaro kernel, so I got pretty depressed about getting linux to run. On top of that, I realized that battery status wasn’t always working, so that meant battery, touch, audio and wifi wasn’t working so I gave up and just went back to Windows, and stopped vising this thread. I was also very busy at the time. I assumed this thread was dead… didn’t realize there are this many people trying to run linux on this laptop.

Battery bug reports:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1337627
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88471
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1569995
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150821

[Michael]

Good news: the multi-touch on the touchpad is working. I’m currently busy though so I can’t really work on this laptop at the moment.

[Michael]

I haven’t quite used it yet. I’m still doing reformats and fiddling with drivers. So far, it performs well in Linux for basic stuff. It performed well in Windows until I connected to the internet (the updates must’ve slowed it down).

I can’t find the touchpad model so I’ve uploaded pictures from device manager and a hardware info dump from “System Information” tool.

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Michael]

Welp, I got my unit today. I installed Manjaro (Arch derivative) and tried Linux kernels 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6. 4.6 was freezing (GPU hangs) but 4.4 and 4.5 were fine. As Chris G said, there’s no wifi, no touchpad and no audio drivers. For Wifi, I tried ndiswrapper (dumped Windows driver), b43, brcm80211, and broadcom-wl drivers and none worked. lspci returns no results (except for the Intel processor). It looks like the PCI is implemented by the CPU instead of the mobo and is non-standard so lspci isn’t picking it up. The wifi chip is a BCM4343SD (obtained from driver dump).

This is a deal-breaker for me to run Linux. I’m just going to run Windows on it. It’s a shame because Linux seemed to run so smooth on it and looked beautiful.

EDIT: Actually, I might just buy this $2 wireless dongle: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/150Mbps-Mini-USB-WiFi-Wireless-Adapter-Dongle-Network-LAN-Card-802-11n-g-b-PC-/272255792708?hash=item3f63b5b644:g:z~4AAOSwO~hXICxO and use a wireless laptop mouse… Hmm…

EDIT2: Also, I should mention that mine came with a Toshiba eMMC and there’s not as much keyboard flex. I will have to try out the performance in the next few days.

[Michael]

Chris G wrote:

Drives will be the main hurdle, I installed Remix OS for PC on the C drive and have it as a dual boot test. Remix boots and works fine, but no drivers for WIFI, sound, and the touchpad. So can’t do much with it, I don’t have time to mess about with drivers so will wait until someone that does come with fixes. Please let me know if your unit has the USB port power issue like mine (Can’t power USB hard drivers) Despite my so-so review, I’m enjoying it. Nice screen, good battery life and one of the more fluid Z8300’s I’ve used to dated and I’ve seen a few!

Fair enough you don’t want to mess with drivers on Linux. Worst-case scenario for me: I’ll just run Windows on this laptop.

Remix OS in particular is a closed-source x86 port of Android which uses an ARM port of an ancient Linux kernel so not ideal for driver support. Wifi will probably require drivers from the repos since Broadcom is not ideal for Linux but I’m fairly confident it will work (there’s also ndiswrapper if it doesn’t work). Touchpad I believe just uses the ps/2 mouse drivers so that’s probably a configuration issue (I should be able to at least get basic cursor movement, left and right click working). No idea about the speakers. Not sure what audio chipset it uses so I’ll find out when it arrives. A little irritating how secretive Chinese manufacturers are about the detailed specs.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an external hard drive to test with. I keep all my files on my home file server (with a decent upload connection) so I don’t use much storage. Normally, I’d just upgrade the SSD but in this case it uses eMMC so if I am hard-pressed on storage, I’ll buy a sd card or an external SSD.

[Author]

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