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This went on sale (more than already always on sale) for $369 this past monday. That's a bundle price so I was forced to take a McAfee box and a mouse for the price. And < $400 out the door after taxes. Tolerable for a 2.5GHz quad core with 8GB RAM.
Mostly the same as my other laptop, the HP 15-ba053nr, with some notable exceptions.
The A10-9620P APU, not the 9600P. Slightly faster RAM. Different ethernet and wireless. Neither of which works particularly well under linux.
The first annoyance was getting the legacy boot enabled. I basically had to delete all known UEFI keys for that to take and work and allow me to boot the non-UEFI debian install that I was previously using on the ba053nr. With several cycles through the bios/uefi to figure that out.
glmark2 scored 1074
(scored about 1052 on the ba053nr)
Otherwise all the same amdgpu and debian testing (buster) or newer for GPU support as the ba053nr.
The ethernet, technically works. But dies fastly and often, I went to one of my usb ethernet dongles relatively quickly. Doing this every 2 minutes got annoying. Especially when trying to game.
# ip link set enp1s0 down; sleep 1; modprobe -r r8169; sleep 1; modprobe r8169; sleep 1; ip link set enp1s0 up mtu 1440; sleep 1; ip addr add 192.168.2.2/24 dev enp1s0; sleep 1; ip route add default via 192.168.2.1 dev enp1s0; sleep 1; ping -c 2 192.168.2.1
Using a dongle solved this quirk. I'll figure out another option sooner or later. Noting a few patches already out relating to power draw and heat or similar issues for the r8169 driver. Wireless technically exists, but I'm not entirely sure a driver exists at this point. The dmesg output hints at rtl8723b for bluetooth support, but ifconfig, iwconfig, and ip doesn't show a wireless interface (yet). So that's annoying.
Otherwise good hardware. Chrome plated hinges which differs from the ba053nr. And a more black / less gray screen than the ba053nr. The screen seems to have darker blacks. Not that i've used it much, but be ba053nr has a noticeable backlight when you hit the power button. It's hard to tell that the bw053od is on with it's screen until the press ESC to pause stuff shows on screen. I mostly use external displays and turn OFF the LCDs though. And still the annoying 1366x768 resolution on the LCD.
I just got this yesterday so more details to follow.
The deal breaker of sorts for me is that NONE of the networking cards work in linux (hopefully a non-issue in six-ish months). The r8169 does "work", but stops working in short order. Which is odd for an Ethernet device. Normally that behavior is wireless drivers and old firmware. Which normally have github drivers and kernel.org firmware that work swell if you want to jump the shark. So far I'm coming up short on alternative drivers for the networking devices on this machine. I have dongles, but that kind of makes traveling with this machine moot. Ethernet dongle to ethernet dongle with a short ethernet cable and a pocketchip (for wifi access) isn't exactly the "I'm busy, don't bother me!" statement in public.
I didn't know about the chuwi, sound interesting. But I'm older and the eyes are more fixed focal length now, so 15" and 1366x768 is readable for me without scaling. I can xrandr with --panning to have a viewport of a larger screen that scrolls around with the mouse. And there's --transform or --scale and --scale-from to make a 1080p X session scale to 1366x768, although mostly only useful for media playback with best GPU perks. Luckily my needs are CPU and RAM for this machine. More of a desktop with built in UPS. And for that, a 2.5GHz quad core trumps a 1.1GHz quad core.
Searching on [103c:80c3] (ethernet) and [10ec:d723] (wifi) results mostly in posts about I have issues. Most of which have 0 responses. And patches seem to be dated near 2008 and 2013, which probably don't apply to these devices. So far the only glimmer of hope is realtek is working on a driver, slated for Q4 2017.
One is the tools to use ndiswrapper, the other is the kernel driver. Note that non-distro supplied kernel drivers will need to be re-created / applied with each kernel update/upgrade.
Assuming you put those in their own directory and are in that directory.
After 19 days of uptime on debian buster (testing), I finally booted arch on this laptop. And so far the 8169 ethernet is stable under arch on the LTS kernel. Odd since it's a 4.9.x kernel where buster is on a 4.13 kernel. Hopefully that doesn't mean future breakage. But it's nice to have one less dongle. And with the help of a lego (megablock) structure, access to the usb 3.x port on the bottom (my orientation) of the laptop. As I note that the ba053nr variant has about 2.5 hours of battery life if left unplugged while playing runescape. Although arch complains about the setup of the [vender:device] for the video card at the initial boot. But works just fine, once you press Alt+F2 to get to a console with a login (versus the error message).
That's nice to know. I tried googling one and found only hints of a driver to arrive late 2017. With no actual driver links. Even though it's now mere days till 2018. I guess it's time to give buster another shot on the other laptop. Now that I know the magic github link.
The r8169 driver did get wonky after about 20 days. Bringing down the network, modprobe -r, then modprobe of the driver brought things back though. It's been soo long since I've had network driver issues in linux. I've gotten spoiled with sbc's aimed at linux I guess. Works out of the box has been the norm, until now. Baring the usual firmware not installed by default quirks.
I did a fresh install of debian buster via debootstrap and the ethernet now works under debian testing/buster. I installed the github source for the wireless and iwconfig shows it has wireless extensions so things are looking good now. Without a reboot I did have to modprobe cfg80211 before doing an insmod on the 8723de.ko module. Unknown symbol errors without the pre-emptive cfg80211 module loaded. Probably self correcting if I reboot. Or I veered off course too quickly (went old school) when modprobe rtl8723de failed, as the module is actually named 8723de.
Official Realtek Linux driver for RTL8723DE is available in rtlwifi-new git repository maintained by Larry Fingers. This module uses mac80211 and not cfg80211. This is the driver that will end up in kernel. The driver is available in the "extended" branch of the said repository. I believe this is better as I get better signal strength in my new HP 15-BS576TX laptop using the rtl8723de module with parameter "ant_sel=2". You can use dkms to build the module also.
Sorry to revive an old thread. How were you able to disable UEFI? I have not had any luck with disable of UEFI to be able to boot from a flash drive to install linux.
I do not have access to the current Windows OS installed and running on it currently. I would rather turn this into a linux only computer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadow_7
The first annoyance was getting the legacy boot enabled. I basically had to delete all known UEFI keys for that to take and work and allow me to boot the non-UEFI debian install that I was previously using on the ba053nr. With several cycles through the bios/uefi to figure that out.
I just got this yesterday so more details to follow.
You need to start a new thread with computer model and specs and what you have tried and how you put the iso onto the usb. On the short disabling secure boot in bios and and fast boot in windows and bios is usually sufficient enough to get a usb to boot.
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