Kubuntu on Samsung Series 5 laptop 530U4C

[Guest]

I have bought Samsung Series 5 530U4C-S0ARU laptop recently and decided to get Linux box on it.
I spent the whole day setting up my Kubuntu environment. Since I got everything working fine finally,
I decided that my experience might be useful for somebody else and have written down all the things I did.

The detailed specs of my laptop can be found by the link below:

http://www.samsung.com/ru/consumer/c...U4C-S0ARU-spec

Here are the main features of this laptop which are worth mentioning:

1. Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge processor 3217U with Intel HD 4000 graphics.
2. NVidia Optimus 620M graphics card.
3. 5400 rpm hard drive (HDD) with 24 Gb flash disk (SSD) (so called ExpressCashe)


As far as I like kde and had some experience with Kubuntu, I selected it for my workstation.

Firstly I have downloaded and installed Kubuntu 12.04.1 LTS for amd64 platform (in Ubuntu it has an ambigous name amd64,
which can mislead. This means all x86_64 processors including Intel ones). I have utilized two ext4 partitions on HDD
for / and /home mountpoints during installation. After installation was finished Kubuntu booted up normally.

By this point I encountered several problems:

1. The laptop was too hot under Kubuntu and had very low life running on batteries.
2. Only some of the functional keys worked properly.
3. I wanted to increase performance and speed up boot and hibernation using SSD.
4. There were no way to select between graphic cards, only Intel card under Mesa driver could be seen out of the box.

In this post I will describe how I have solved all these problems on my Kubuntu box.


1. After mesa driver update for IntelHD4000 graphics to version 9, kde starts glitching according to the bug described here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...z/+bug/1042211

To make kde effects work properly the following downgraded mesa driver packages should be installed from here:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source...8.0.4-1ubuntu1

libegl1-mesa
libgl1-mesa-dri
libgl1-mesa-glx
libglapi-mesa
libglu1-mesa

Both amd64 and i386 packages should be installed, because 32 bit packages are needed by Bumblebee package which we will install later.

Then these packages should be locked, for example, using Muon software center to prevent their update in the future.
I suggest to update and lock mesa driver packages before installing any software updates, because downgrading from mesa 9 seemed not so easy to me.


After installing proper Mesa driver full software update and system reboot should be done.


2. Then Samsung-tools from "Linux on My Samsung" project should be installed. The packages from project PPA provide some hot-keys and power-saving
functionality availible specifically on Samsung laptops.

Installation starts with adding PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:voria/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Now we should install the packages from this PPA:

sudo apt-get install samsung-tools samsung-laptop samsung-backlight phc-intel easy-slow-down-manager


3. Now we should get working our NVidia Optimus 620M card. There is a project named Bumblebee designed for this purpose.

http://bumblebee-project.org/

Bumblebee turns off NVidia card by default for powersaving and provides an API for utilizing NVidia card resources when needed.

To install Bumblebee we should add PPA repositories with Bumblebee and the latest NVidia drivers:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get update

Then install needed packages and reboot:

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

To test if everything works a simple program 'glxspheres' can be used. To run it on Intel card only simply type:

glxsperes

To run glxspheres using both Intel and Nvidia cards type:

optirun glxspheres

If everything works fine fps should be higher in case of two cards (by 80% on my system)


4. The next step is to set up SSD drive. Normally there are two tasks, where ssd can help: fast hibernation and file caching on slow hdd.
I have divided my 24GB SSD disk into three partitions with approximate capacity of 6,8 and 8 GBs respectively: the first for
hibernation, the second and the third for file caching.

I have 6 Gb RAM, so 6Gb swap drive is enough for hibernation. I formatted the first 6Gb SSD partition as "linux swap".
Hibernation is disabled by default in Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) 12.04. To enable it open file /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/com.ubuntu.enable-hibernate.pkla
and add these lines to it:

[Re-enable hibernate by default]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

After reboot hibernation option will appear in logout dialog.

There is a project named Flashcashe developed by Facebook which can be used for SSD caching of HDD.
Detailed instructions can be found in this blog:

http://nitocris.over-blog.net/articl...109792445.html

I made two combined flashcache devices for home and root partitions strictly following the instructions in the link above.
Don't forget to make flashcache unmount boot script to prevent data loss on shutdown.

Using flashcashe has drastically sped up the booting process on my system (by several times).

5. To speed up the booting process a bit more, grub can be set to silent mode. Just edit the /etc/default/grub,
uncomment the following line:

GRUB_TERMINAL=console

and set up timeout to 0:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=0

Then type:

sudo update-grub

Now our Kubuntu works almost perfectly. Enjoy!


Upgrade:

There is one more issue I faced after writing this post. When using skype my voice was hardly audible to others because of the permanent noise.

There are two sources of this problem:

1.There is no built-in noise filtering in ubuntu for Intel HDA internal microphones.
2.There is an Intel ALC269 sound card and an internal microphone with inverted channels on 530U4C (and on many other models). You can read more on this here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1002978

Unfortunately, there is no simple solution of the first problem. The second problem can be solved as described below:

Install the latest alsa-hda-dkms module from here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-a...aily/+packages

Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:

options snd-hda-intel model=inv-dmic

After reboot the sound should become audible. However some noise will still remain.

The sound levels can be set with alsamixer or pavucontrol programs. To open input device settings in alsamixer press F4.

[jackie999]

I have a Samsung NP550P5C on order and am researching the best way to get 12.10 to dual boot on it and came across your post. Did you install 12.04 under BIOS mode and disable UEFI? Is 12.04 preferred over 12.10? Can you still access windows 8 or did you wipe it? There is so much conflicting info out there on dual booting these win8 machines...being a Samsung just adds to the confusion.
Thanks for writing up your experience so far BTW.

[Guest]

I am not familiar with UEFI stuff, so I changed boot mode to CMS and disabled secure mode.

I haven't kept dual boot in mind, when I was setting up Kubuntu. The idea was to make Kubuntu boot as fast as possible. That's why I even disabled OS choice dialog in GRUB. However I haven't deleted Windows partition or any of it's backup partitions considering that may be I will use it someday. Win8 can't be booted from GRUB on my system (some kind of error occurs with standard makeactive && chainloader +1), but it works fine when I change boot mode back to UEFI. May be there are some grub settings for booting Win8, but I don't know exactly.

I suppose that the simpliest way to organize dual boot with UEFI enabled is to use Grub4dos, which can be booted directly from windows loader and then boot Kubuntu.

12.04 was chosen only because it is an LTS release,

Hope it will help!

[jackie999]

Hope it will help!

Yes thanks, this does help. I chose 12.10 since it had UEFI support but I've since read that isn't the case on a Samsung - on these machines UEFI can be damaging ..so it must be turned off...so perhaps 12.04 is the better choice.
Thanks again!