I have purchased an MSI Wind U100-257CA (6-cell battery) and have finished an initial install of openSUSE 11.0 on it. I thought I would give a small report which some may find useful.
Firstly, I assume anyone interested in this topic would know about the helpful wiki at:
OpenSuse 11.0 - MSI WInd User wiki
I did a net install using UNetbootin on a USB drive, but instead of pointing to download.opensuse.org, I mounted openSUSE-11.0-DVD-i386.iso on another computer on my home network, made that mounted image a samba share and pointed UNetbootin to that share instead.
On initial bootup my MSI Wind set up WinXP on sda2, a 39.1Gig partition of the hard drive (drive C) (sda1 is a 3.9Gig recovery partition for WinXP) and the balance of the HD is set up as an empty partition on sda3 (drive D). In installing openSUSE I destroyed the sda3 partition and created an extended partition sda4 divided as follows: sda5 – 2.0Gig linux swap partition, sda6 – 29.5Gig / (root) partition, sda7 – 72.9Gigs /home partition (remaining space). I installed GRUB to the MBR replacing the WinXP MBR. The installation went smoothly. I did not run into any screen issues on installation. The screen was recognized as 1024x600 and I did not have to make any changes to xorg.conf as described in the wiki. After the install I had a dual-boot (openSUSE 11.0, WinXP) machine.
I was unable to get wireless working using the OEM installed Realtek RTL8187SE wireless card using ndiswrapper. I did not bother to try to compile any of the Realtek driver code source versions which are floating around as I haven’t seen any reports that the compiled code produced a flawless driver. Instead I bought an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG card and an additional 1Gig of SODIMM RAM, opened the case, installed the RAM and substituted the wireless card. There is a nice video here:
How to Add RAM to the MSI Wind NB - Video Tutorial
which shows how to open up the case and install the RAM. I might add that it is easier to begin to remove the side of the case which has the power and USB inputs (right side looking downwards at the back of the case) rather than the other side because some sockets for the other side (VGA out, audio in, audio out) extend through the case. Consequently, after removing the 9 screws it is easier to pry off the back from the right side. Installing the RAM is easy once the back is off. Substituting the wireless card requires a bit of care as the two small antenna sockets need to be removed from the Realtek card and snapped back onto the Intel card. I found it helpful to use a 5X jewellers loupe to see what I was doing. On bootup the Intel wireless card is recognised immediately by openSUSE and the appropriate driver is installed. I notice during bootup that there is a message to the effect that WPA may not be implemented by the card. This message is incorrect. I am using WPA2-PSK with wpa_supplicant.conf and the card works fine.
There are two issues with the MSI Wind which have been the subject of some discussion on the MSI Wind forums:
- small periodic clicking noise;
- controlling screen brightness.
I have found a fix for both of these issues. I did not invent either but found them from reading the MSI Wind forums and searching the web. If anyone has a more elegant fix for either of these two issues I would be most grateful to hear.
- small periodic clicking noise
The HD used in the MSI Wind seems to have a fairly aggressive “power saving” feature which causes the head to move to a rest position after a very short period of inactivity. Because the MSI Wind is so quiet this periodic parking noice is noticeable. Its not particularly annoying but if you don’t want to live with it there is a fix. The fix is the command:
sudo /sbin/hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
This will keep the disk spinning and override the head parking. I made up a little shell script “hd.sh” and placed it in /home/[user]/.kde/Autostart (I am using KDE 3.5.9):
#!/bin/bash
This is to stop frequent HD head parking which sounds
like clicking
sudo /sbin/hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
I needed to alter /etc/sudoers to give password free access to /sbin/hdparm to the user.
- controlling screen brightness
The Fn-F4 and Fn-F5 keys (brightness down, brightness up) do not seem to work well in openSUSE. Also, KPowersave seems a little flakey on the MSI Wind with openSUSE. The problem is that the screen seems to want to be at 100% brightness and this screen is quite bright in normal lighting. After bootup or after screensaver mode it seems to go back to 100%. I found I could use KPowersave in KDE Control Center if I first fiddled with the screen brightness slider then dismissed the dialog with the close box not the “Ok” button (I said the operation was a little flakey). In searching the web I came across a command line which seems to work better:
sudo echo -n 100 > /proc/acpi/video/IGD/LCD/brightness
will place the screen at 100% brightness. I could get 7 other settings by substituting 100 with: 30 40 50 60 70 80 90. I made up another script “lcd” as follows:
#!/bin/bash
if -n “$1” ]
Test if command line argument present (non-empty).
then
echo -n $1 > /proc/acpi/video/IGD/LCD/brightness
else
echo -n 100 > /proc/acpi/video/IGD/LCD/brightness
fi
and placed this script in /home/[user]/bin. I can then control the screen brightness with a command such as:
sudo lcd 60
I find that particular screen brightness more comfortable to use. The screen brightness level does seem to “stick” while the computer is being used.
I have not got the built-in camera working yet, but I have not tried so I cannot report on this–in any event it does not work “out of the box”; nor have I tried to use the external VGA socket. Everything else seems to work fine including USB, sound and SD socket. The keyboard is quite usable. The MSI Wind runs surprisingly cool and quiet and the Intel Atom N270 chip gives nice performance (especially considering it uses 2.5 watts at full load). The touchpad has a small quirk in that the top right and bottom right are “touch to scroll”; the touchpad does not have the usual “swipe to scroll” on the right side. I understand that MSI substituted a Sentelic touchpad for the Synaptic touchpad and the former lacks the “swipe to scroll” feature. This has been the topic of a large amount of discussion on the MSI Wind forums. I myself don’t find it a big deal and find that the touchpad works well in openSUSE. I would have redesigned the buttons below the touchpad to be a little less flush with the case and split the rocker button into two but again this is not a big deal after using the machine for several hours.
Basically, I feel I have a perfectly functional normal laptop running openSUSE except it is smaller, lighter, and seems to have about a 5 hour battery life.