Linux On My Samsung

Hi,

I bought a samsung 900x3a and installed Ubuntu on it. I'm very pleased of this computer and everything was fine with Ubuntu 11.04

I recentely updated to Ubuntu 11.10 and I like it, but there is hardware problem.

With Ubuntu 11.04 it used to be really quiet (I never heard the fan) and the battery lasted for more than 4 hours. When I upgraded on 11.10 (with Kernel 3) the fans are never quiet and the battery life dropped to about 2 hours only.

I tried to do a few things (for instance adding pcie_aspm=force in the grub config) and it helph a little bit (maybe 30min) but the fans are still very noisy.

I looked for my cpu temprature and found that it was really high. With PSensors I see 77°C on one cpu and 30°C on the second. With lm-sensors I see 76°C on one and 29.8°C on the second. And when I use samsung-tools -a (status) I see 76°C.

For the fan, it I change to mode "silent", it get's quieter but I don't want to let it like this because I don't want the CPU temperature to get even higher.

Does anyone know what I can do? What's wrong with Ubuntu 11.10 compared to 11.04? What changed?

Thank you for you help.

Hi
I had the same problem today with a fresh Debian testing (3.0.0 kernel) installation on a 900X1B: high cpu temperature and a lot of fan noise (and short battery life).
Following the instructions found here

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ower&num=1

the temperature has dropped by 15 °C and the fan noise has disappeared, I haven't tested the battery but comments here http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/linu ... pad-fixed/ claim battery life more than doubles using this configuration.

I used this for a few hours without any problem, compositing works fine (in KDE).

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing bad battery life and high temperatures on the same Samsung (90X3A) device with the initial official release of 12.04 - Precise Pangolin :-(

Seems the kernel boot options for i915 seem to make the problem worse this time, so I've just kept the defaults and installed Jupiter, which makes the problem only slightly better.

I'm starting to think this is something affecting only a small subset of SandyBridge boards, since many people report the power regression bugs as being resolved in 3.2 kernels - and I'm starting to really regret getting this particular laptop, as amazing as it is.

Im facing the similar problem..does anyone knows what to do with it??

I know my post is quiet old but I still want to update it... Maybe it will help someone with the same computer as mine.

I install a fresh Ubuntu 14.4 x64 and refound all the noise and over heat. What I've done to improve all that is:

FIRST AND IMPORTANT. I tried an installation with efi and the step of silent mode below was not available and it seems the system was slower and less fluent. So before installing Ubunut go to the BIOS (F2 at start) and change the UEFI mode to disable. After that install Ubuntu.

1) Change the Grub according to this post :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1865820

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 pcie_aspm=force quiet splash"

(to modify the Grub you need to be root. What I've done is open nautilus vis the terminal in root but you can as well directely open the grub file via the terminal)
The file is located etc/default/grub

Then in the terminal : sudo update-grub

2) install samsung-tools http://www.voria.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1091
then enter in the terminal :

samsung-tools -c silent
(only possible if ubuntu is installed with UEFI disable)

That will put the fan in silent mode and that makes a big difference.

Hope this can help...

hello,

thank you for your post!

do you know if there are any downsides of installing ubuntu 14.04 in bios mode? thanks!

Hello,

No sorry I don't know what are the down sides of bios mode. =(

Yeah, but, have you experienced any disadvantages yourself when using ubuntu in bios mode?

Hello,

sorry for the long time to anywer. No I didn't noticed any inconvenient at all... Everything is fine, I really don't know what is the real difference