Running Debian on Samsung NC10
This may not be really interesting, since today (2012-01-01) almost everything Just Works on sane hardware. There are ancient instructions all around that scare you with all kinds of tricky workarounds for various problems that you get on PC hardware and poor system integration. Maybe this will provide a little contrast :-)
The hardware
- Samsung NP-NC10
- Intel Atom N270 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM (1 empty slot)
- Intel 40GB SSD (hdparm around 512/64 MB/s)
- Intel 945GME graphics
- Marvell 88E8040 PCI-E ethernet
- Atheros AR242x Wireless Network Adapter (BG)
- Builtin Bluetooth
- Builtin SDHC reader
- 10.2" TFT
- Intel TCO chip (rng, wdt)
- 6-cell(?) battery, 4200/5200 mAh according to ACPI, 80% of original capacity
What works
- Boots and runs, no crashes or major problems
- linux-image-2.6.32-5-686
- linux-image-3.1.0-1-686-pae
- X, xv, xrandr, DRI (3D graphics), free Intel driver, Just Works without any config!
- WLAN (ath5k, bg router)
- Sound (snd_hda_intel)
- Ethernet (e1000e)
- Bluetooth (btusb)
- CPU frequency scaling (acpi-cpufreq, ondemand 0.8-1.6GHz)
- Suspend to ram and hibernate to disk (2G swap)
- Printing to Samsung ML-1640 (USB, hotplug, CUPS)
- memtest86+ from GRUB
- Thermal sensors (ACPI virtual)
- Fan speed set by fancontrol
- Booting off USB mass memory
- USB, keyboard, pointing device, any other trivial things
What doesn't work
- Windows, in the long run :)
Comments
Happy little laptop with amazing battery life (6h+ in active use in the initial install/setup spree on Windows).
Debian Wheezy ran rather well. I have upgraded to Jessie and also appears to work right out of the box. There were rumours of a2dp being broken in newer bluez. It works well on both Wheezy and Jessie. Wheezy may have required some enable/disable configuration line. There should be easy to find guides for that.
The hardware has also been doing well. Battery life is still decent despite advanced age. There were problems with the screen (cabling). Disassembling and reassembling has apparently helped.
At the end of 2015, the laptop is still running, never reinstalled after switching to Debian. The display has quite rare blackouts and the processor fan is rattling a bit. Haven't tested battery life for a while.
Links
- NC10 Wikipedia
- NC10 Sammywiki
- NC10 screen fix and teardowns
- old version
- InstallingDebianOn