Samsung just recently released a new piece of kit, ATIV Book 9 plus. Its their top of the line Ultrabook. Being in on the market for a new laptop, when I heard of the specs, I was hooked. Sure it doesn't have the best CPU in a laptop or even amazing amount of ram, in that regard its kind of run of the mill. But that was enough for me. The really amazing thing is the screen, with 3200x1800 resolution and 275DPI. If you were to get a stand alone monitor with similar resolution you'd be forking over anywhere from 50-200% the value of the ATIV Book 9 Plus. Anyway this is not a marketing pitch. As a GNU / Linux user, buying bleeding edge hardware can be a bit intimidating. The problem is that it's not clear if the hardware will work without too much fuss. I couldn't find any reports or folks running GNU / Linux on it, but decided to order one anyway.

My distro of choice is Debian GNU / Linux. So when the machine arrived the first thing I did was, try Debian Live. It did get some tinkering of BIOS (press f2 on boot to enter config) to get it to boot. Mostly because the BIOS UI is horrendus. In the end disabling secure boot was pretty much all it took. Out of the box, most things worked, exception being Wi-Fi and brightness control. At this point I was more or less convinced that getting GNU / Linux running on it would not be too hard.

I proceeded to installing Debian from stable net-boot cd. At first with UEFI enabled but secure boot disabled, installation went over fine but when it came time to boot the machine, it would simply not work. Looked like boot loader wasn't starting properly. I didn't care too much about UEFI so I disabled it completely and re-installed Debian. This time things worked and Debian Stable booted up. I tweaked /etc/apt/sources.list switching from Stable to Testing. Rebooted the machine and noticed that on boot the screen went black. It was rather obvious that the problem was with KMS. Likely the root of the problem was the new kernel (linux-image-3.10-3-amd64) which got pulled in during upgrade to testing. The short term work around is simple, disable KMS (add nomodeset to kernel boot line in grub).

So now I had a booting base system but there was still the problem of Wi-Fi and KMS. I installed latest firmware- iwlwifi which had the required firmware for Intel Corporation Wireless 7260. However Wi-Fi still did not work, fortunately I came across this post on arch linux wiki which states that the Wi-Fi card is only supported in Linux Kernel >=3.11.

After an hour or so of tinkering with kernel configs I got the latest kernel (3.11.3) to boot with working KMS and Wi-Fi. Long story short, until Debian moves to kernel >3.11 you'll need to compile your own or install my custom compiled package. With the latest kernel pretty much everything works this machine. Including the things that are often tricky, like; suspend, backlight control, touchscreen, and obviously Wi-Fi. The only thing remaining thing to figure out, are the volume and keyboard backlight control keys. But for now I'm making due with a software sound mixer. And keyboard backlight can be adjusted with (values: 0-4):

echo "4" > /sys/class/leds/samsung::kbd_backlight/brightness

So if you are looking to get Samsung ATIV Book 9 and wondering if it'll play nice with GNU / Linux. The answer is yes.

I got myself one of the fancy shmancy netbooks. Due to a habit and some hardware issues I needed to compile a kernel. The problem here though is that it takes for ever to build a kernel on one of these things. No sweat I'll just build it on my desktop, it'll only take 5-10 minutes. But of course there is a catch. My desktop is 64bit and this new machine is an Atom CPU which only does 32bit.

The process for compiling a 32bit kernel on a 64bit machine is probably a lot easier if you don't compile it the Debian way. But this is not something I want to do, I like installing the kernels through the package manager and doing this type of cross compile using make-kpkg is not trivial. There are plenty of forum and email threads about people recommending to use chroot or virtual machines for this task, but that is such a chore to set up. So here is my recipe for cross compiling 32bit kernel on 64bit host without chroot / vm, the-debian-way.

1. Install 32bit tools (ia32-libs, lib32gcc1, lib32ncurses5, libc6-i386, util-linux, maybe some other ones)
2. Download & unpack your kernel sources
3. run "linux32 make menuconfig" and configure your kernel for your new machine
4. clean your build dirs "make-kpkg clean --cross-compile - --arch=i386" (only needed on consecutive compiles)
5. compile your kernel "nice -n 100 fakeroot linux32 make-kpkg --cross-compile - --arch=i386 --revision=05test kernel_image" for faster compilation on multi-CPU machines run "export CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=$((cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "^processor"|wc -l*2))" first
6. At this point you have a 32bit kernel inside a package labeled for 64bit arch. We need to fix this, run "fakeroot deb-reversion -k bash ../linux-image-2.6.35.3_05test_amd64.deb". Open the file DEBIAN/control with vim/emacs and change "Architecture: amd64" to "Architecture: i386" exit the bash process with ctrl+d
7. That's it, now just transfer the re-generated deb to destination machine and install it.

Many if not all ideas for this process come from reading email threads the comments made by Goswin Von Brederlow were particularly helpful, thanks.

Every six months the internet lights up with stories that Canonical & Co has done the unthinkable they have increased the number following the word Ubuntu. In other words they have release a new version. This is a well understood concept to differentiate releases of software. As the version increases it is expected that new features are introduced and old bugs are removed (hopefully more are removed than added).

Versioning distributions and releasing the versions separately is a common practice, employed by most if not all distributions out there. Ubuntu has adopted the policy of releasing regularly and quite often. But there is a different approach it revolves around a concept I call "Versionless" where you do not have a hard release but instead let the changes trickle down. In the application world these releases are often called nightly builds. With distributions it is a little bit different.

First of all its worth noting that distributions are not like applications. Distributions are collection made up by applications and a kernel, the applications that are included are usually stable releases and so the biggest unpredictability comes from the combination and configuration there of. As a result one of the important roles for distro developers is to ensure that the combination of the many applications does not lead to adverse side effects. This is done in several ways, the general method is to mix all the applications in a pot, the so called pre-release and then test the combination. The testing is done by whole community, as users often install these pre-releases to see if they see any quirks through their regular use. When the pre-release becomes stable enough it is pushed out the door as a public release.

In an ideal world after this whole process all the major bugs and issues would have been resolved and users go on to re-install/update their distribution installations to the new release -- without any issues. The problem is that even if the tests passed with flying colors does not mean that on the user will not experience problems. The more complicated a configuration that a user has the more chances they will notice bugs as part of upgrade. This is particularly evident where there are multiple interacting systems. Doing a full upgrade of a distribution it is not always obvious what change in the update has caused this problem.

Versionless distributions are nothing new, they has been a staple of Debian for a while. In fact it is the process for testing package compatibility between release, but it is also a lot more. There are two Debian releases that follow this paradigm, Debian Testing and Debian Unstable. As applications are packaged they are added to Debian Unstable and after they fulfill certain criteria, IE they have spent some time in Unstable and have not had any critical bugs filed against them, they are then passed along to Debian Testing. Users are able to balance their needs between new features and stability by selecting the corresponding repository. As soon as the packages are added to the repositories the become immediately available to user for install/upgrade.

What it really comes down to is testing outside your environment is useful but it cannot be relied solely upon. And when upgrades are performed it is important to know what has changed and how to undo it. Keeping track of changes for 1000's of updates is nearly impossible. So update small and update often, use Debian. Good packages managers are your best friend, but only second to great package developers!

Apparently Linux does not have any monitor hotplugging support which is quite a pain. Every time you want to attach a monitor to laptop you have to reconfigure the display layout. This is a tad frustrating if you have to do this several times a day. And it doesn't help that KDE subsystems are a bit flaky when it comes to changing display configuration. I've had plasma crash a on me 1/3 times while performing this operation.

Long story short I got fed up with all of this and wrote the following 3 line script to automate the process and partially alleviate this head ache

 #!/bin/bash
 xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --output VGA1 --auto
 sleep 1
 kquitapp plasma-desktop &> /dev/null
 sleep 1
 kwin --replace & &> /dev/null
 sleep 1
 kstart plasma-desktop &> /dev/null

You probably need to adjust the xrandr line to make it behave like you want but auto everything works quite well for me. Check man page for xrandr for details.

For further reading on monitor hot plugging I encourage you read launchpad bug #306735. Fortunately there are solutions for this problem, however they are on the other side of the pond.

Update: Added the kwin replace line to fix sporadic malfunction of kwin (disappearance of window decorations) during this whole operation.