Viraj's Weblog

I've been wanting to buy a Linux laptop. There are a bunch of vendors now selling them from the high-priced Emperor Linux to probably Walmart. I felt like supporting a small Linux laptop vendor, and narrowed my choices down to either Zareason or System 76. I heard about both on the Linux Action Show Podcast.

I decided to go with System 76 as it was a bit cheaper. I purchased a Pangolin Value laptop for about $1k. Here are the specs:

1 x Pangolin Value (PAN-V4) = $998.00
       Bluetooth no Bluetooth
       Extra AC Adapter no extra AC adapter
       Extra Battery no extra battery
       Hard Drive 80 GB 5400 RPM SATA
       Hardware Warranty 1 Yr. Ltd. Warranty and Technical Support
       Laptop Bag no bag
       Memory 2 GB - 2 x 1 GB DDR2 667 MHZ
       Operating System Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Linux
       Optical Drive CD-RW / DVD-RW
       Portable Flash Drive no flash drive
       Processor Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0 GHz 800 MHz FSB 4 MB L2
       Wireless 802.11 abg

Sounds pretty nice right? Well I got the laptop and generally things were working. They installed Ubuntu with wifi drivers, etc. Immediately though I noticed one things: a super-sensitive tap-to-click touchpad. I straight off went to look for mouse preferences but could find no indication of tap-to-click. In fact, to the system it appeared I had a regular external mouse. So began my hell trying to get this laptop in a usable state.

You can see my cry for help on this support forum thread. Interestingly I think my original posting was deleted for some reason. Maybe they are worried about bad PR? The gist of it is they said there is no Linux driver and the 'solution' is to disable the touchpad. That's just fucking ridiculous, and I pretty much lost all respect for System 76. I mean, why even claim you are a Linux laptop vendor when you are selling laptops with proprietary hardware without Linux support?

This laptop was pretty much unusable to me. After some long hard searching I came across this Ubuntu bug report which eventually led to this kernel bug. That shed some light. Well at least it proved that someone else was going through the same pain.

I contemplated writing my own driver as it would be a good learning experience. But I'd likely need a Windows box to do any reverse engineering. I didn't have one, and this didn't sound like fun at all. A few weeks passed and then someone updated the bug stating that a driver had been written. The announcement was a patch asking for comments. I decided to try it.

Now I haven't compiled a kernel in a long time. I needed to find out the proper way to do so on Ubuntu. I decided to follow the steps on this Ubuntu page. After going through it, I think this howto would have been a better choice. Basically I had to manually apply the patch as the kernel source I got was different than what was assumed. It was only a few changes though. It took many hours to compile, and only afterwards did I realize it was compiling many different kernels for different architectures. Sigh, this whole package management stuff for kernels is a real pain.

Eventually I had a running kernel with the new driver. But I'm not at the end of the race yet. I'm in communication with the author debugging some issues. I did manage to disable the tap-to-click by writing the proper hex value to the registers provided via /sys by the driver. However there seems to be some problems with window focus where applications don't give up the pointer. Hopefully some debugging with Arjan (the driver author) will resolve this. Stay tuned.