Which linux distro on new ASUS 1215N?

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Yes, the behavior of the 1215N disk is pathological. So many spin downs and spin ups are definitely bad for the lifespan. My disk spinned down approx. 3 seconds after every access, so I couldn't work with the system in a reasonable manner. hdparm solved the problem.
 



hdparm is the only thing that works. I kept my windoze partition and use it occasionally. the hard disk clicking is evident in windoze as well. there is a small program for wdoz called hddquiet that basically does the same thing as hdparm. other people have eventually just replaced the HDD with another brand to solve the problem.

Also, tried Squeeze on my machine and wlan, suspend and hibernate did not work. Do all 1215N's have the broadcom WiFi card?
 


I don't know for sure, but I think all 1215N have the Broadcom chip.

My WLAN itself works without problems. I use the firmware-brcm80211 driver. Suspend also works. Hibernate aborts with a message "cannot find swap device". Unfortunately, I guess the WLAN driver cannot cope with suspend, so that the WLAN doesn't work anymore after waking up. But I don't need suspend or hibernate because the system boots very quickly.

I think the 1215N works pretty well under Debian -- last but not least it is designed for Windows, not Linux. If I wanted 100% of the hardware functions working under Linux, I think I would have had to take another (and probably older) machine which is definitely known to be supported completely.
 




So basically you installed the broadcom-sta common and source packages using the ethernet connection first? I tried to do this in Squeeze and had a heck of a time until I just gave up. I would love to use Debian instead of a derivative. Did you install with a swap partition?
 


Hm, I can't remember using broadcom-sta... I think I only installed brcm80211 using dpkg (I downloaded the DEB file using another machine, the Asus didn't have web access). And then it worked. I hope my memory doesn't fool me. I just checked my packages, apt sais broadcom-sta is not installed.
 
This website was giving me registration problems, so was rather terse.

BTW: Can't have period or minus in the local-part of an email address? What RFC 2822 did the forum writer read?

Anyway, to summarize:

GigE not working. Last I checked, latest atheros driver wouldn't compile on recent kernels. Latest driver in Ubuntu seems to flake out after a few seconds.

OPTIMUS not working. That seems to mean HDMI out not working.

ASUS Customer Service, doesn't. They stonewalled me. I have my own theories about why they were so unhelpful.

I've really tried to document everything; I hope you find it useful. I've spent absurd amounts of time on getting this laptop to work, mostly.

I will never buy another ASUS laptop. ZaReason and System76, here I come!
 


This "review" doesn't make much sense to me. The guy seems to be surprised that Linux doesn't run out-of-the-box. Well, that's pretty normal. And he is surprised that the Optimus doesn't work. Oh - my - god. Besides, I installed my Debian in much less than 16 hours and I am NO EXPERT! So, don't believe this "review".
 
Well, "the guy" is a bit surprised that Linux doesn't work right out of the box, since according to my coworker, everything did, on the previous model (1201N, possibly). I bought the 1215N based on that recommendation.

As far as Optimus, I'm not as up-to-date on hardware as most of this board, I'm sure, as I hadn't heard of ION or OPTIMUS prior to buying this laptop. I just saw nVidia and figured it'd be supported in Linux, as that was always the case with my desktops.

Note that this is only my second laptop. My previous one was a HP 2133, whose problems I detailed here:

http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/hp_2133_links.html

I suppose it's not so much a review as a chronology of the problems I found, but I'm a bit surprised that you don't "believe" it; maybe you think I'm saying that it'll take 16 hours for other people - what I was really saying is that it took 16 hours for me. I'll correct that now.

Hopefully it will save other people who have this laptop a significant amount of time.

Sorry you didn't find it useful.
 
Also, I think it *is* also a bit surprising that none of the EEE distros actually have functional wired or wireless.

I spent several hours on downloading and installing EEE-specific distros that don't work very well (eeebuntu, easypeasy, etc.).

So, yes, if you think 16 hours spent installing is a long time, so do I, and hopefully others can avoid a lot of the dead-ends I ran into. ;-)

Believe it... or not.
 
if you re going to use linux on a machine, you are going to have to expect some kind of configuring. Some of the distros will not work with the wifi until after installation...not sure why. others the wifi works right away. The latest version of Knoppix worked about 90%. Debian Squeeze requires an ethernet connection until you can download and install the broadcom-sta packages. In fact, most of the Debian-based distros work this way. The only issue I have had with any linux on my machine is the inability to suspend or hibernate. I use that feature a lot on my other machine that runs linux with no issues. As far as optimus goes, I could care less at this point. Jupiter does not work the way it is supposed to.

I will keep my windoze partition on my VX6 until suspend/hibernate work.
 
If I recall correctly, support for (at least some) Broadcom wifi chips was dropped from the Linux kernel due to some reason basically boiling down to an unwillingness on the part of Broadcom to release a programming API. Some drivers were based on reverse-engineering existing drivers, and it's entirely possible that they were removed from the kernel for that reason, or because they weren't reliable across all Broadcom chipsets and configurations. I discovered this only because when I installed the latest OpenWRT on my Linksys wrt54g, there was no broadcom support, and I had to downgrade. It's quite possible that Knoppix may include such drivers, similar to how some distros include mp3 codecs and others don't, and similar to how OpenBSD refuses to put "binary blobs" in their kernel source. This is just my speculation, of course.

If anyone gets reliable atheros GigE functionality out of linux on the ASUS 1215n, please let me know. As the article states, I was unable to compile the latest driver source from atheros against the latest kernel. Why Atheros doesn't merge the source into the kernel tree and let them upgrade it every time the device driver APIs change, I don't know. I sent them a few patches to fix up some of their driver source, but didn't have time to do their whole job for them. Of course I never heard back.

BTW, usually Ubuntu distros work pretty much out of the box on desktops (with proper component selection). 90% of the configuration I do is all encapsulated in a shell script. It's laptops and mobile phones that tend to have more proprietary, black box components with special driver requirements, or where you simply don't have the choice of, say, what video card to install. Hopefully that will change over time, but they're resisting commoditization as hard as they can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbOfnj67ZwM
 
I am writing this on an ASUS 1201T using Linux Mint, no problems. The Linux Mint hardware database contains an entry for the 1215n which says it works perfectly.

-Sonic
 
My VX6 is running three partitions; Windoze 7 pro, Knoppix 6 and Sabayon 5.5 XFCE 64 bit. Both Knoppix and Sabayon work very well, including suspend. No hybrid graphx (to be expected). I would recommend either of these distros for the 1215N or the VX6.
 
I forgot to mention that the WiFi didn't work straight away, but was up and running on both after installation without any extra configuration.
 
I've had pretty bad experience using Ubuntu with 1215N.

First I tried Ubuntu 10.04, ran into problem with
- wireless - on and off
- microphone - didn't work at all

Then I upgraded to 10.10
- now wireless and wired both work fine
- and microphone works too
- but then I can't get any external monitor to work

I'm wondering if I'm missing some driver? But from what I've read here and else where, I could get black screen for trying that so I've held off.

Other problem with the 1215N
- Had to send it back to to ASUS service to fix the power plug: the needle got stuck in the power plug. Apparently a common problem that others also ran into.
- The screen isn't that bright, has problem in sunlight.
- The touchpad keys are flimpsy.

Not as sturdy and well-made as the EEE PC 1000 also from ASUS, which worked perfectly with 10.04. But I do like the bigger screen and faster processor.
 
If you're having nVidia Optimus issues, you should check out Bumblebee.

The guide is from ArchLinux but I use it on my Ubuntu install and it works great. You basically select the applications you want to use the nVidia card with, all others default to integrated graphics. Just read the install instructions carefully.

Also, if you have issues loading up Ubuntu from liveCD, press F6 while you see the Graphical Menu (whichever the button is labeled for additional options) and check apci=off to see if that helps. Peace!
 
I'v installed many linux distroes on 1215n. finally I chosed debian branches like ubuntu, solusOS, Parsix. (but not linuxmint) all of them works fine.

The touchpad problem is a hardware problem. you must open the touchpad case and paste something between the floor and the case itself. (I did it and solved the problem).

ION can be turned off. as we don't play games, you can keep it off for ever!

I have 4hrs 40min battery charge with ION off, and 3hrs with ION on.

wifi, usb3, fn keys, lan, bluetooth, everything works.

but as you may know, Linux is not like windows which everything is ready to use. you should know a little about linux to make it work on your 1215n. If you are a newbie, and you don't want to eat your time (!) in struggling with linux, I recommend you windows 7 + an antivirus!!!
 
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