Fedora on Samsung X120 notebook
My lovely Sony Vaio VGN-TX1XP partially died last week, after I managed to drop it while fumbling for the keys to my car. The keyboard doesn’t work, though the touchpad is fine, and the wireless doesn’t work. Ho hum. I’ll have a look at fixing it later, but I really can’t do without a laptop, so I had a look for another one to fill its place.
My selection criterion for a laptop is very simple: it’ll be exactly A4 size. Any smaller than that and I won’t be able to type on it; any larger and I won’t want to carry it around in my rucksack. I looked at the natural replacement for my old TX1 from Sony, but that cost £1600 at the time, and they still cost over £1300, so I discounted them.
I decided on the Samsung NP-X120-FA03UK, at a shade under £500. I ordered it on Monday from Laptops Direct and it got here yesterday afternoon.
I had been using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on my Vaio. This is despite using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora at work, and Fedora at home on my desktop. I picked Ubuntu because the wireless worked straight away, whereas on Fedora it did nothing at all.
However, a few years on, I’m happy enough with Fedora 11 on my desktop, so it is time to try it again, because I’d rather learn one way of administering things on all my machines. The X120 doesn’t have an optical drive, so I hooked up a USB DVD drive, changed the boot order in the BIOS, and inserted a Fedora 11 disk. At the first reboot after partitioning, there were some problems, which I think I recall seeing mentioned on the mailing lists, so I simply went through that stage again (at just a few minutes’ cost), and it worked second time.
After package installation, and booting into my new OS, I found that the wireless didn’t work. Even turning off security wouldn’t allow it to connect, so I hooked up an Ethernet cable and performed an update. After that, it works perfectly.
This is the first laptop I’ve had with an HDMI output. I had a very quick play with that this morning, but didn’t get any output on my TV. I’ll try playing with that later.
Hello, do you have any news about this laptop life?
I am looking for A4-size low-weight notebook right now. And X120 seems to be good.
How does it work with HDMI, card reader, webcam in current Fedora?
What can you say about its temperature?
Thanks in advance.
I’d been meaning to post some more about this, so thanks for the question. I haven’t measured the battery life yet. I’ll stick it on charge now, and see what it reports at 100%, then I’ll let it discharge in idle, while preventing the display from turning off, and see what it reports.
I connected it up to my full HD TV the other day with an HDMI cable and used xrandr to switch displays over. There is the usual “switch displays” icon on the Fn-F4 key, but I haven’t figured out how to make that do the switch automatically, yet. It felt very strange, using a laptop with a 37″ display.
The card reader takes SD cards. I plugged in a 16 GB SDHC card from my camera, and F-Spot quite happily grabbed the photos from it, no problem.
The webcam was automatically used when I installed and fired up Cheese. Capturing video clips in Cheese seemed sluggish and choppy, but I didn’t experiment further because I have no interest in using that.
I haven’t yet managed to send a picture to it from my phone with bluetooth, or the other direction, which I used to do all the time on my Vaio. That needs investigating, but I’ve always found it tricky to know exactly which bluetooth packages I should be installing.
My single gripe about the keyboard is that the backslash key has moved from where it should be, at the left of the Z, to just left of the right shift key.
What I am missing, over my old Sony Vaio VGN-TX1XP, is an external volume control and a switch to turn off the wireless and bluetooth, but they are not big issues. I certainly think this is a fine replacement.
Hey,
I’ve just installed Fedora 11 on an X120. Do the brightness up and down keys work for you? They don’t under Linux here.
Rob
No, they don’t. I’ve experimented with connecting the keys up to events, but when I tried to dim the display, it was as if the key automatically repeated, dimming the display but then not accepting any other key presses. I’ll have to investigate more, because I’ve never tried touching this before
For what it’s worth, I tried editing the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/30-keymap-misc.fdi and adding the following lines to the Samsung section:
I restarted the machine to get my keyboard back. I really should read the documentation
On further investigation, the problem with the keyboard seems to be the same as with other Samsung laptops, which means they need a patch for keyboard quirks in the kernel driver. Here’s a patch for the Samsung Q320 by Nick Gasson. I’m building a kernel (following the instructions) with an appropriately modified patch right now, but it looks hopeful.