Dell Mini 9

I got my Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in the middle of december 2008, and of course it was the Windows XP Version (because of the hardware), but I made sure to put a Linuxdistribution on top soon.

I decided to go with my standard system openSUSE (11.1 was fresh back then), knowing that this distribution isn't specialized for the use of small(er) displays and the install on a SSD Flashdisk but I'm used to the tools and configuration of it.

So this report can help you with similiar distributions and also similiar hardware although some driver stuff is pretty tight connected to the Dell machine.

The Model is available in different specifications. I describe my own here, it is the German Windows XP Modell as of fall 2009.

The X.org Intel driver is currently (version 2.5.0, 2008-11-06) broken. The screen flickers in random intervals and sometimes goes dark (while X is still running). The log contains error messages like “(EE) intel(0): underrun on pipe B!„. Adding

Option     "FramebufferCompression" "False"

to the „Device“ section in xorg.conf helps.

Some Bios-Versions (at least A001) causing unintentional backlight intensity changes every few seconds (in some Applications!). The permanent sollution is to upgrade the Systembios to A004, quickhelp comes with

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native

The proprietary 'wl' driver comes directly from Broadcom and is not (and will never be) part of the mainline kernel.

With openSUSE it is very easy to install it, you need a one-time acces to the internet either via cable on your Mini or another system

If you go with your Mini activate the „Packman“ Repository (ADD → Community-Repository → pick Packman from List) and either search for „broadcom“ via yast or zypper. If you don't have cable access but other systems you can download it directly from the Packman Homepage and copy it via Thumbdrive.

Some things about the touchpad really piss me off. First, the tapping feature while writing text often leads to a dislocated cursor and messed up words. I wrote a script to disable tapping with a fn-key. Second is horizontal scrolling, nearly every browser (at least opera ) use this for jumping around the tabhistory and this is mostly unprecise, so I disable the scrolling completly with an entry in xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "synaptics"
  Identifier   "Touchpad"
  Option       "Buttons" "5"
  Option       "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option       "Emulate3Buttons" "on"
  Option       "InputFashion" "Mouse"
  Option       "Name" "Touchpad"
  Option       "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
  Option       "SHMConfig" "on"
  Option       "Vendor" "Synaptics"
  Option       "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
  Option       "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
  Option       "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
  Option       "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
EndSection

With the Bios update to A004 all keys on the keyboard works (F11 and F12 are added with FN+Y and FN+X!). But with openSUSE 11.1 three keys were not bound directly to their respective functions.

• The „Sleep key“ (FN+1) doesn't work, mainly because powersave does not know the machine and disable Suspend to Ram first. But you can set any command to the key if Standbye works.

• The „Wireless key“ (FN+2) was the second key out of function, you can either set it to unload your bluetooth-module and shutdown the broadcom device with a script. But as I need Wireless Network all day, I use the key for calling my Touchpad Tapping Switch script, do easily disable the tapping when writing longer text.

• The third key that did not work, was the „Battery key“ (FN+3). I takes some more time to figure it out, but now it works like everything else.

The problem was, that the key was not bound to the x-server, so we have to bind it manually with this file

keycode 241 = F13

The correct keycode (if it really is any other) can be picked with xev on the commandline.

After restarting X (or testing with xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap) it should be recognized as F13. I use a small script to display the complete Battery info:

#!/bin/bash
STATE=$(powersave -abc)
ICON="/usr/share/icons/oxygen/48x48/devices/battery.png"
echo $STATE
notify-send "Battery Info" "$STATE" --icon=$ICON --expire-time=3000
#kdialog --passivepopup="$STATE" 3 --title "Battery Info"

You can use any other icon if you are not using the oxygen icon.

A test on how long the netbook runs on battery under „normal netbook use“ is available here.

I use ext3 right now with some tweaks to reduce write-traffic, but i think it is possibly better to use ext2.

After my RAM-Upgrade to 2GB I decided to reduce the swap space to 200 MB, so only dirty pages can picked out of the RAM. I think I don't hit the „memory-full“ mark yet.

With only 16GB of space I have left the original Windows XP in its place, reducing the space to 5GB and pick the rest for Linux.

You REALLY should use a external MMC-Card for your daily use, I do only use the SSD for the system and programs, tempfiles goes to virtual Ram-FS and my saved documents are stored either on the MMC or even on a thumbdrive. It's much cheaper to buy a new MMC than an internal SSD

The specification says something about 10 MB/s for write and higher reading-rates, but the HDD was connected via USB, so I cannot decide who's the blocker here

$dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=/media/disk/daten_minimi_290109.dd
7741424+0 Datensätze ein
7741424+0 Datensätze aus
3963609088 Bytes (4,0 GB) kopiert, 386,73 s, 10,2 MB/s

The internal disk was a bit faster, so this should rule out the USB-HDD as a slowdown factor for reading the MMC, I don't know how it effects the SSD

$dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/media/disk/opensuse11.1_minimi_290109.dd
16771797+0 Datensätze ein                                                      
16771797+0 Datensätze aus                                                      
8587160064 Bytes (8,6 GB) kopiert, 579,578 s, 14,8 MB/s  

I first try to write on a FAT system (yep, the 4GB mark hits me ;) ), this had a slightly higher speed

4294967295 Bytes (4,3 GB) kopiert, 272,937 s, 15,7 MB/s 

A problem I experienced a bunch of times is losing the partition table of the external SD-Card. I try to make sure it is unmounted with a script (see downstairs) for the s2ram system, but unfortunatly it is although lost after a suspend to ram with a completly discharged battery

gpart /dev/sdf

might help, although you hopefully had not any old partition tables on the card, works best with only one times partitionated and formatted cards.

I try to describe my upgradeprocedures here

With falling prices, I was an easy decision to double up the RAM to 2GB for about 20 Euro.

The Upgrade is pretty easy and straight forward (as you see in the gallery):

• turn the Mini upside down on a flat surface
• remove the battery and of course the poweradapter
• loose the two screws inside the visible cover
• pull the two clips slightly away from the RAM-chip, so it get loose
• gently pull it out
• take the new chip in the exact same manner
• push it into the mounting-place in about 30° from the backside
• pull the softly down until the clips click together and it is tighten
• close the cover, mount the screws and see if everything works

Some tweaks to reduce the diskwrite

First we remove the read-timestamp and add to every line containing either the SSD or the MMC-Card the noatime parameter, this affects the inode update when a file is read.

You can either uncomment the /var/tmp line or make a link on your filesystem. The /dev/mmcblk0p1 is also optional, if you don't use your cardreader this way.

/dev/sda5            /                    ext3       acl,user_xattr,noatime 1 1
proc                 /proc                proc       defaults               0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                 0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                 0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5        0 0
/dev/sda2            /windows             ntfs-3g    noatime,users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=de_DE.UTF-8 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p1       /daten               ext3       noauto,noatime,users,exec       1 1
tmpfs                /tmp                 tmpfs      mode=1777              0 0
#tmpfs               /var/tmp             tmpfs      mode=1777              0 0
tmpfs                /var/log             tmpfs      mode=1777              0 0
tmpfs                /dev/shm             tmpfs      defaults               0 0

No matter which browser you are using (as this kind of machine is mainly build for surfing the web), make sure to avoid any caching on disk. You better buy 2GB Ram if you feel slow than using the disk for caching. My settings in Opera are OFF for disk-cache and AUTOMATIC for the RAM-Cache, and I don't noticed any trouble on that.

Here some screenshots from the Dell Mini 9

OpenOffice in openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2

Just suddenly after the one year full warranty expired I noticed some problems with the SSD Drive. Roughly in the first half hour after booting the SSD drive disappeared from the system, the linux terminal says „I/O Error“ and even a really cold reboot with detached battery brings it not back immediately. Sometimes the bios talks about a 0200: Failure Fixed Disk 0, other times only the boot manager won't show up. I didn't have enough time left yet to backup the whole disk with dd, but thankfully most data is on the separate SD Card.

Today I got answer from DELL, nothing specially in my case, just the offer for a Transcend SSD 64GB worth ~190,-€ (160 + taxes).

Note to me: Not every SSD fits