Hi, this is a quick account for installing openSUSE Leap 42.3 and eventually TUMBLEWEED on a 2017 Razer Blade Stealth Laptop.
The openSUSE DVD and NET images have a bug and won’t boot with UEFI. Need to fix them with mksusecd or they won’t be boot in UEFI no matter what. Without UEFI boot, there is no UEFI install. Enabling CSM in BIOS and booting non legacy mode works, if you really want to.
If you click boot settings during installation summary (opens bootloader config), and then Kernel Parameters, the whole thing freezes. So don’t do it.
My partition setup is EFI partition + Boot partition + ext4-encrypted for root partition. No swap because, once things swap, you’re screwed anyway. Hibernating to an encrypted swap disk is only possible with LVM.
The installation goes through, but boot hangs (dracut waiting for device). It turns out cryptpad has a wrong device-id for the disk. Booting the rescue mode shows the SSD drive is available under to names: “nvma-SAMSUNG…” and “-SAMSUNG…”. During the real boot the latter doesn’t exist. Need to boot into rescue, cryptsetup open the root partition, fix /etc/crypttab, mkinitrd. In case grub needs a hug, mount all the parititons, including boot and efi in /boot and /boot/efi, chroot and run the steps like here. Also efibootmgr is your friend for fixing or cleaning up the EFI entries on boot at this point.
Windows manager choice is i3. Loging manager choice is lightdm. Upon boot everything seems super small. Need to adjust dpi options for lightdm in lightdm config. After a few retries, my i3 configuration runs “xrandr --dpi 192”. In 43.2 you’ll also need to manually set i3 font, i3bar font, dmenu_run font settings. In TUMBLEWEED it seems the xrand command makes everything larger and more consistent.
Note if you installed Python, there are no alternatives set for Python2.7 vs Python3.4, even though there are for pip. This will get some apps in trouble.
Configure your sound card in yast2. Soundcard uses Realtek ALC282. Fully broken in openSUSE 43.2 Kernel. No hardware volume control: means the master volume has no effect on the PCM volume, but mute works and volumes over 100% -software amplification- too. Also no headphone detection (only if you reboot with them plugged in), and I think the mic was also pretty broken. I have spent many hours trying to work around this, but the only fix is a kernel upgrade (this was fixed somewhere along 4.11). If you install from the kernel:/stable repository, it will fix it for 42.3, but these kernels aren’t signed for secure boot. So either you go through the badly explained loophole of enrolling the signature they have (or signing them yourself), or move to TUMBLEWEED.
OpenRazer rpms still don’t work with this Laptop, but they will as soon as >2.0.0 version is released (hopefully), as support has been added in master.
Systemd suspends the laptop when closing the lid. But when you open it again it can enter a suspend loop in which the computer keeps suspending every few seconds (thanks systemd). Edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf HandleLidSwitch. If you really want this, install acpi and set up a listener for the lid/close event which runs pm_suspend (google it).
Bluetooth seems to work, but had a lot of trouble connecting to my headphones. (Make sure pulseaudio bluetooth plugin is installed). It turned out, my headphones don’t like when someone not discoverable connects to them. In “bluetoothctl”, run “discoverable on” when connecting. After successful connection, you can turn it off. It used to work without that though.
Because of the broken sound, I did an upgrade to TUMBLEWEED. It fixes the sound but immediately noticed screen flickering. It very noticeable on console mode. It is fixed by setting the boot parameter “i915.enable_rc6=0”. Considering how old this problem seems to be, not sure it will be fixed. Also not sure if it has a bad effect on battery lifetime. Intel acceleration set to “sna” seems to work well enough, but I haven’t tried video playing yet.
Things seem to mostly work now, finally. Hopefully this helps anyone dealing with this laptop.
Also, installing xf86-input-synaptics seems to leave the touchpad without 3rd-button (middle). Probably fixable with explicit configuration though, but I haven’t noticed much different without it.
Could you please file bugreports for the things you found, incl. fixes, workarounds? We don’t see many devs and packagers here. Bugreports will be read though.
As a follow up, I went back to openSUSE Leap 15.0 from Tumbleweed, because Tumbleweed insists on being permanently broken in one way or another and Leap 15’s kernel supports the sound-card.
All of the above tips and tricks still apply, but other than that, Leap 15.0 seems to work quite well (I have the feeling it’s faster and battery seems to be better).
Eh, how did you upgrade TW? I’m running it on both laptop and server as a daily workhorse and have done so since 2015 ( found out yesterday ) withouth issues, so TW defnitely is not permanently broken.
On Tue 20 Nov 2018 02:36:03 PM CST, Knurpht wrote:
hsanjuan;2886755 Wrote:
> As a follow up, I went back to openSUSE Leap 15.0 from Tumbleweed,
> because Tumbleweed insists on being permanently broken in one way or
> another and Leap 15’s kernel supports the sound-card.
>
> All of the above tips and tricks still apply, but other than that,
> Leap 15.0 seems to work quite well (I have the feeling it’s faster and
> battery seems to be better).
Eh, how did you upgrade TW? I’m running it on both laptop and server as
a daily workhorse and have done so since 2015 ( found out yesterday )
without issues, so TW defnitely is not permanently broken.
Hi
Likewise with a couple of AMD CPU/GPU laptops, TW breaks for the likes
of users running nvidia, virtualbox, out of kernel tree modules etc.
The only issue I have at the moment is with sensors command due to
kernel changes which is currently being addressed by lm_sensors
upstream.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-25.25-default
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I am an openSUSE user since about 10 years ago (maybe more). I did
zypper dup--no-allow-vendor-change
and my setup is very vanilla. One day it’s NetworkManager applet not working and having to use nm-cli, other is the nm-applet icons not being replaced but overlayed on top of the previous ones, or not saving passwords, then I started suffering network stalls for some type of local traffic (with things like scp-ing files on the local network stalling after a few bytes), then poweroff and reboot actions randomly either hang or take 2 minutes or work, then Win+shift+v did not work but other shortcuts did. The latest thing was the bindings for the Fn keys (brightness/multimedia) not working anymore because i3 stopped catching the event somehow even though xev et al reported it correctly. Every zypper dup was a bit of a lottery for me, it fixed something but could break something else very randomly and very hard to debug. I have the feeling that in comparison with Leap, TW was a bit laggy, but that may just be a feeling.
By the way, using intel, so video that was the least of my worries (apart from the flickering, the manual X configuration mentioned above etc).
Note that the laptop itself is probably not free of blame in all these issues, but I don’t have time to figure out every second day why some things don’t work. I run Leap in my other computer and I’m very happy.
I’m using Leap 15.0, because I like its stability. I would not describe Tumbleweed as “permanently broken”. It mostly works well on my test machine. But I still prefer the additional stability of Leap 15.0.
In any case, the nice thing is that you have the choice.