Archlinux on my Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 (with bonus opinions that weren’t requested)
This is the story of me (long time Thinkpad user) looking for a new cheap laptop for University with good GNU/Linux support, good portability and great battery life.
Back in January I started looking for a new laptop, mainly for University (I’m a foreign languages student in Verona). I needed to accomplish basic tasks like note taking, browsing and multimedia. The only other two requirements were great battery life and good GNU/Linux support. I ended up buying a Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 on Gearbest. This version has the latest Celeron N3450 by Intel (not that shitty -badly supported- Atom) and an empty m2 slot on the motherboard. So, as soon as I received it, I slapped in my ssd (I suggest you to buy a 22x42, my 22x80 required manual intervention on the case to fit in) and booted my archiso.
Installation is pretty straightforward (assuming that you’re familiar with the way Arch works and command line, of course), the only problem is that the shitty (Sandisk!) emmc where Windows resides is badly supported by the Linux kernel so you get random errors here and there. And yes, I wanted to keep Windows and no, I didn’t want do install Arch on the emmc due to the bad support.
Once booted up my new install everything worked out of the box (of course you need Intel drivers and synaptics, as always) so I went on, installed some basic software (termite/tmux/i3/weechat, heh) and started looking at some basic settings to improve battery life (remember, I attend 6–8 hours of lessons every day, I’m in desperately need of battery life).
So I installed xbacklight and was pretty happy to see that everything worked (remember, I’m a long time Thinkpad user so moving from that seemed a jump in the dark to me).Special Offer:
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$ xbacklight -set 50
Backlight set to 50% does the job for me, no problems at all.
I wondered what was possible at cpu-level so i fired up cpupower to see that the only two governors available are “performance” and “powersave”, not so good, I ended up setting the max frequence manually:
# cpupower frequency-set -u clock_freq
Pretty good workaround, working perfectly for note taking. (No, you don’t need Chrome to read Reddit/4chan if you’re taking notes!)
Another interesting software to use to gain some “juice” is TLP, it comes with a default configuration optimized for battery life but you can tweak it a bit to suit your needs, the config file is pretty simple and the Arch wiki linked above is your friend, you won’t regret it!
The interesting part comes with Powertop, which shows a lot of “bad” settings in its report which can be fixed by enabling it as a service with systemd (assuming that you know how to enable a service, if you’ve come this far in the post)
/etc/systemd/system/powertop.service
[Unit]
Description=Powertop tunings
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/powertop --auto-tune
RemainAfterExit=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Unfortunately, enabling Powertop’s auto-tune feature solves all our problems but brings up a big one, it freezes the touchpad and you can’t use it anymore. Assumed that I’m a happy i3 and Vimperator user, I still need my touchpad working, so we need a workaround and fortunately our friend Chris teaches us how to fix Powertop’s behaviour.
Basically you create another systemd service to launch after Powertop and fix some settings, seems to work at the moment. (The post is pretty long, in case you need it click the damn link, there’s no need to copy-paste it here)
Last but not least the damn systemctl suspend command seems to work only if you disable Bluetooth with rfkill (this is what I’ve come to understand, take it with a grain of salt). So basically install rfkill and
# rfkill block bluetooth
This should fix suspension, any further updates won’t be posted here because I’m pretty sure I’ll forget to do it.
So, at the moment I’m happily writing this post from my Chuwi. As the screenshot below shows.
omg so h4xx a bitmap font
I’m pretty happy with this laptop, it does anything I need, I can get solid 5–6 hours on battery while having a 1920x1080 display and a pretty good portability, I know it’s not a Thinkpad but I was in desperately need of something light and slim to throw in my backpack and this chinese guy is perfect.
The only thing I need to understand now it how two motherfucking grains of dust entered the damn display, thing I just noticed while typing this on the damn white Medium page which is killing my eyes.
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