ZaReason Verix 547 Touchpad Freezes

This is another in my series of love notes to ZaReason's Verix 547 Linux-compatible laptop.  This time I'm working on some odd "pauses" or "freezes" in the behavior of the touchpad.

Every now and then, seemingly at random, I'll be moving the pointer with the trackpad and suddenly the pointer simply stops.  Clicking, swiping, dragging... nothing.  I can continue to type, so the keyboard is still active, but otherwise the trackpad is simply unresponsive.  Interestingly, if I switch away to a virtual terminal and come back, miraculously the touchpad is active again!

At first I thought it was related to the trackpad itself, which is:

$ xinput --list | grep Touch
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]

$ cat /proc/bus/input/devices
...
I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0007 Version=01b1
N: Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event4
B: PROP=9
B: EV=b
B: KEY=6420 30000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=260800011000003
...

So, a Synaptics part.  But I couldn't quite find anything that matched the exact behavior.  My weak Google-fu finally dropped me here:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/766166/elantech-touchpad-related-nvidia-driver-freeze/

It's not exactly the same environment - the author specifically calls out an ElanTech touchpad, but the behavior is smack on.  Naturally, this is an NVIDIA PRIME-/Optimus-related issue.  ::sigh::

Turns out this author helped identify a bug and it was fixed in an upstream Xorg release - but not the Xorg used in *ubuntu.  While my Xorg says it's 1.16.1 and the was applied to 1.16.0, apparently the patch didn't get accepted until a later release of 1.16.1 - comparing the release dates via 'X -version' showed me that.  Even xorg-edgers didn't have a later X release with the patched code.

A very kind soul packaged up a .deb with the patched xorg binaries and supplied them here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/507744/touchpad-acting-weird-in-14-04-on-msi-cr70-2m/550603#550603

Long story short, I downloaded the .tar, extracted the .debs, and installed the ones that mattered.  (This user is obviously an X developer, as he had tons of debugging tools and virtualized X server tools installed.)  All I needed was xserver-common and xserver-xorg-core.

It worked!  The touchpad freeze is completely gone.  Thank you, friends!

Oh, and until I upgrade to Kubuntu 15.04, which comes with the fixed X, I put those two packages on hold in apt via:

echo "hold xserver-common" | dpkg --set-selections

This makes life easier when I'm doing upgrades and I might forget to uncheck the xorg packages.

OK, another laptop quirk knocked out!

Knocking out the little things with my ZaReason Verix 547

So, as I've detailed in prior posts, I'm running Kubuntu 14.10 on a new Verix 547 laptop from ZaReason, a vendor and integrator in Berkeley.  So far it's been going well, but there are niggles to deal with, of course.  Even ZaReason, which specifically configures and supports Linux on the machines they sell, has problems with some functionality on this laptop.  Just goes to show the power of OEMs that only test and guarantee operation on Windows - such a hassle!!

Here are some of the issues I've had out of the box with the Verix:

1. lightdm absolutely refuses to show the greeter (login) screen.  I can still log in and it starts up a Plasma session, meaning the keyboard is active and the greeter is detecting my keystrokes and parsing the password, but the greeter is blank.
2. There are intermittent pauses in the touchpad operation.  At random times the touchpad will simply cease accepting input.
3. Sometimes the desktop environment (Plasma/KWin) would become corrupted and unresponsive after a resume from suspend.
4. I can't get audio to output to the HDMI port.

Some of these I've already managed to get around.  Woo-hoo!  Thank you, Interwebz!!  Specifically:

1. After searching for days and trying many hacks, lightdm was still always showing a blank screen for a greeter.  The strangest thing was that I could still type my password, press enter, and then the splash would come up and the desktop environment (Plasma) launched fine.  This would happen whenver the greeter was shown, such as logging out and relogging in.  However, the screen locker was fine - resuming from suspend would show the password field.
   
   After a LOT of fiddling around and searching, I knew that the problem was related to X and not to the touchpad.  For example, I could tap the pad and move the cursor outside the password field, and suddenly typing and pressing <enter> wouldn't log me in.
   
   Also, I didn't see any errors in the X or lightdm log.  Nothing that screamed "Hey, I can't display myself!".  I found a post that describes dealing with black screen issues with NVIDIA Prime systems.  It referred specifically to 14.04, but it talked about the same problem - booting up into a black screen with keyboard active and switching to a VT.
   
   The post was mainly concerned with corrupt xorg.conf's that were being rewritting by 'gpu-manager', which I don't appear to have running on my system.  BUT, when I compared their "correct" xorg.conf to my own conf file, I noticed something interesting.  They included this option in the Intel device section:
   
   

   Section "Device"
       Identifier "intel"
       Driver "modesetting"
   EndSection

   
   The "modesetting" driver was something I hadn't seen before.  Here was my xorg.conf, autogenerated by nvidia-xconfig:
   
   

   Section "Device"
       Identifier "intel"
       Driver "intel"
       BusID "PCI:0@0:2:0"
       Option "AccelMethod" "SNA"
   EndSection
   

   
   Mine was a tad different - notice the "intel" driver, but that's really it.  Everything else is just extra specification.  So, I modified the driver to go from "intel" to "modesetting" and... VOILA!  I can see the lightdm greeter now!  It's not pretty - very barebones, but it works!  I assume I can hack on the theme (background, etc.) to make it nicer.

This post is a little longer than I expected, so I'll address the other issues in subsequent posts.

My new ZaReason Verix 547 and Kubuntu 14.10 - almost perfect!

So, as I recounted in a previous post, I returned the Gigabyte P55W rev4 laptop because I couldn't get it to run Kubuntu 14.10 reliably.  I replaced it with a ZaReason Verix 547 15.6" big, honkin' machine and I've been getting Linux up on it.  Little quirks along the way, but I can't complain so far.

I decided to try to save some dough and reuse 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3L memory I had, as well as reuse a SanDisk Extreme 480GB SATA SSD and a Mushkin 120GB mSATA SSD, all from my late and lamented Dell Inspiron 15R Special Edition (2012).  ZaReason was amenable to this, and actually delivered a laptop to me without any memory or storage.

In retrospect, I should have just gone with their components.  For one thing, I blew up my memory during the install.  Well, it died sometime between when I ripped out of the obstreperous Gigabyte lappy and I installed it in the new Verix system.  The system booted fine and brought up the GRUB menu both on my SSD and from the live Kubuntu 14.10 stick.  But, trying to load an OS choked with kernel panics, and a subsequent mem test immediately barfed out tons of errors (red lines in MemTest86 are bad).

After a quick trip to Frys, and an eternal wait for them to actually find the memory in their little locked electronics wire bunker, I was back in business.  The Verix is easy to get out, with only 6 screws to undo and then easing the plastic tabs out to get access to the bottom of the laptop.  The two 2.5" SATA slots are there, as well as 2 of the memory slots.  But, I couldn't find the other two memory slots or the mSATA slot.

I think those are actually under the keyboard, but I couldn't figure out how to actually get it off.  I can see the tabs above the F-key row on the keyboard.  I have to insert some implement into the tabs to force the keyboard out of the tray... but I can't figure out how.  Oh, well.

The problem with adding the memory from the base of the computer is the memory slots are partially covered by the heatpipe from the 970M.  Ugh.  Here's a picture:

You can see the two empty SO-DIMM slots to the left of the big-ass heatsink.  This was more of a pain than I expected.  It took some time and patience, but I did finally get them installed:

It all came up fine.  The mem test went fine, the Kubuntu install was easy.  Woo-hoo!

 At this point it was running Nouveau and doing OK.  I did an update, an upgrade, then a dist-upgrade and rebooted.  Yeah, yeah, I probably didn't have to reboot... but there were some messages on the Interwebz indicating people had encountered problems installing nVidia binaries without doing HARD shutdowns in between.

Then came adding the xorg-edgers PPA and doing another update.  Another reboot, then going into a TTY (X didn't come up), running nvidia-xconfig to generate a default X.org config file... and here I am!  glxgears is rocking around 11K FPS (with anti-aliasing and font smoothing turned off...), and the display is nice.  Yeah, it's REALLY big, but the sound is also fine.  I can't complain.

Not all's perfect, though it is pretty durn good.

I've been having an odd "pause" problem where the display seems to freeze for a period of time.  Turns out it was related to my trackpad... but more on that later.