{"id":1359,"date":"2014-03-22T01:52:57","date_gmt":"2014-03-22T05:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=1359"},"modified":"2014-06-17T00:15:33","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T04:15:33","slug":"inspiron-11-3000-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=1359","title":{"rendered":"Inspiron 11-3000 Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pappp.net\/?attachment_id=1360\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1360\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pappp.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Inspiron113000.jpg\" alt=\"Inspiron113000\" width=\"1400\" height=\"1050\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1360\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The KAOS lab recently bought a fleet of five Inspiron 11 3000 <a href=\"ftp:\/\/ftp.dell.com\/Manuals\/all-products\/esuprt_laptop\/esuprt_inspiron_laptop\/inspiron-11-3138_Reference%20Guide2_en-us.pdf\">3138<\/a>[PDF Warning] (Celeron N2815\/4GB\/500GB)laptops.  They&#8217;re tiny little machines with 8 hour claimed battery lives, they&#8217;re pretty cute and sort of obstinate. <\/p>\n<p>I borrowed one to play with, notes:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Windows 8 is <em>incredibly<\/em> bad.  I had been operating under the assumption that a touchscreen made it better; in actual fact, it just makes it clearer that it consists of two half-baked userlands that share a filesystem and kernel. So of course, Linux.\n<li> They are absolutely legacy-free machines: UEFI with no BIOS emulation, HDMI, USB, I think the only analog connector on it is the audio out.  Note that that means you need a digital input or active adapter for external displays.\n<li> You can&#8217;t boot these things directly with EFISTUB or anything that depends on it, it just dies on kernel load.\n<li> You also need a rather new kernel to deal with the <strike>Haswell<\/strike> weird late-generation Silvermont+Bay Trail part, Ubuntu 13.10-derived media won&#8217;t even boot.\n<li> <strike>I <em>usually<\/em> get a successful boot with Arch and a 3.13 kernel booted via Syslinux, though occasionally it just dies on boot for reasons I can&#8217;t explain but suspect are GPU-related. I haven&#8217;t tried Grub2 because I&#8217;m no longer willing to mess about with its awful config system.<\/strike> <b>Edit: Problem is gone with more recent kernels<\/b>\n<li> Having the <code>i915<\/code> modue in the initramfs appears to be a necessary prerequisite for video.\n<li> By default, the brightness keys register events\/trigger OSD in various DEs, and echoing into <code>\/sys\/class\/backlight\/intel_backlight\/brightness<\/code> controls the brightness, but it binds to the wrong ACPI device. Fixed with <code>video.use_native_backlight=1<\/code> kernel line as noted <a href=\"http:\/\/community.kde.org\/Solid\/PowerDevil\/Brightness\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.archlinux.org\/index.php\/backlight\">here<\/a>.\n<li> The keyboard is 80% size, short travel, mushy, and generally kind of awful feeling, but perfectly usable.  It has PgUp\/PgDn\/Home\/End on Fn+Arrow which I find I quite like (arrow moves a char, ctrl+arrow moves a word, fn+arrow moves a line\/page). The F-keys can be swapped between media-first or F-first in the firmware.\n<li> The volume buttons produce the desired <code>XF86Audio*<\/code> codes, hook them and go.\n<li> The touchscreen is an Elan part that <em>just works<\/em> to an amazing degree.  Not all programs do graceful things with it, but you can at least move and click, the <a href=\"https:\/\/addons.mozilla.org\/en-us\/firefox\/addon\/grab-and-drag\/\">Grab and Drag<\/a> extension makes Firefox work well with the touchscreen.\n<li> The touchpad is possibly the worst I&#8217;ve ever encountered.  It is a clickpad design with <strike>two<\/strike> one mechanical button<strike>s<\/strike> under the bottom edge of the touch sensitive surface.  This means fiddling the synaptics configs to prevent clicks from registering both as a finger moving on the touch surface and a click.  I can&#8217;t get it to let me chord R+L for a middle click either, which is <em>extremely<\/em> annoying.  It is also very wide and poorly placed, so it&#8217;s both uncomfortable and prone to random events while typing.  I currently have <code>syndaemon -t -k -i 2 -d &<\/code> in my DE startup to disable while typing, and this <a href=\"https:\/\/pappp.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/50-synaptics.conf\">50-synaptics.conf<\/a> in my xorg configs to make it approximately usable. Unfortunately, this kind of shit is getting really common.\n<li> Wifi is an ath9k family part, Ethernet is an r8169, both work great out of the box.\n<li> The SD card slot is full depth (not like the stupid half-depth slots that many small laptops have lately).  Unfortunately, it does not seem to be bootable.\n<li> I haven&#8217;t tested Bluethooth.  The controller enumerates, so it will probably work&#8230;\n<li> 1366&#215;768 is not really enough pixels to get shit done, but it isn&#8217;t as far off as I feared.\n<li> It really does get in the neighborhood of 8 hours of battery with good settings.\n<li> Using <code>powertop<\/code>&#8216;s tunables can make a 2x improvement in battery life on these things, with no apparent user-visible ill effects.  I&#8217;m using the <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.archlinux.org\/index.php\/powertop#Tips_and_tricks\">powertop systemd service file<\/a> from the arch wiki to make it happen automatically.\n<\/ul>\n<p>The big remaining problem is that I can&#8217;t get sleep or hibernate working <b>EDIT: pm-suspend seems to work now. But only wakes on lid open.<\/b>  The direct kernel method crashes on sleep, <strike>pm-suspend seems to sleep successfully but dies on wake, nothing ever gets written out on hibernate, etc. This is really annoying in a little highly portable machine.  Unfortunately, at this time, it seems to be a kernel deficiency .  One of my suspicions is that the problem is there is no way to <em>wake<\/em> the machine once it goes to sleep because the listeners for the inputs aren&#8217;t being hooked up correctly, but I don&#8217;t even know where to start poking to fix or even properly diagnose it. <\/strike><\/p>\n<p>Once that&#8217;s fixed, and almost even without, they&#8217;re really excellent devices to carry around &#8211; In principle, I prefer something like this to either a full-sized laptop or a tablet for larger-than-a-smartphone ubiquitous computing.  These particular ones have some weaknesses &#8211; A proper 3-button touchpad and move to a 1600&#215;900 or so display would make them great, a crisper keyboard on top of that would make them truly excellent &#8211; but they are definitely more useful devices than the netbooks or tablets they roughly compete with.  <\/p>\n<p><b>EDIT 2014-05-07:<\/b> After a little bit of fussing I got the <code>SoftButtonAreas<\/code> Synaptics option to work and have a 40|20|40 right middle left button split working on the clickpad.  The attached <a href=\"https:\/\/pappp.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/50-synaptics.conf\">50-synaptics.conf<\/a> linked in this post has been updated, but it is basically the <code>Option \"SoftButtonAreas\" \"60% 0 82% 0 40% 59% 82% 0\"<\/code> line from <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.archlinux.org\/index.php\/Touchpad_Synaptics#Buttonless_touchpads_.28aka_ClickPads.29\">the Archwiki article<\/a> that did the trick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The KAOS lab recently bought a fleet of five Inspiron 11 3000 3138[PDF Warning] (Celeron N2815\/4GB\/500GB)laptops. They&#8217;re tiny little machines with 8 hour claimed battery lives, they&#8217;re pretty cute and sort of obstinate. I borrowed one to play with, notes:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1,10],"tags":[236,257,78,51],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-general","category-objects","tag-arch","tag-inspiron-11","tag-kaos","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}