Ubuntu on Let's Note (Defenestration and Deforestation, part 2)

In part one of this rant, I focused on AC adapter problems and how vendors, being stingy and hyper-competitive, use such problems to get us to buy new when we shouldn't, and how that pushes us to send a lot of potentially useful hardware to landfills and underdeveloped cities and countries where they poison workers and the environment instead of being properly recycled.

(Yeah, yeah, that sentence is too long, and my posts tend to lack that marketable "focus".)

Well, being the fan of libre software that I am, I decided to see how much use I could make of the notebook PC in question, a Let's Note CF-NX2 notebook PC anyway.

I started by installing the Android cellphone developer's kit, Android Studio, from Google. It ran,

but it took ten minutes to start an emulation session with naive settings. RAM might help, and emulating AMD64/i86-64 instead of ARM64 would probably help significantly.

But I'm not going to buy the extra RAM for this notebook until I'm sure I want to keep it, so I don't know how much the extra RAM would help.


(Really, if I want to develop for Android cellphones, I should be running the developer's kit on an ARM64-based PC, not on an old AMD64/i86-64 notebook PC. Yeah, that means doing my homework, because those are hard to find at high-enough specs. Let's not get lost in theories about why they are hard to find.)

So, test 1 -- Results, mixed.

Test 2 -- I installed Ubuntu on an external USB3 240G SSD (JPY 5000 or so).

It runs quite nicely, but it interacts rather inconveniently with the adapter problems.

Yeah, that's the brightness control on the screen, showing an undocumented state. And it often boots up, both in Ubuntu and in MSWindows, with the brightness on the internal screen forced to the bottom limit, with no response to the brightness controls, when the AC adapter is plugged in. You can't do much useful in a screen that dark.

Watching the boot process while playing with the BIOS to try to find a fix to the dark-screen-on-boot problem revealed some interesting facts about the AC adapter:

The intermittent connection in the adapter makes it think the adapter is not the original adapter for this PC.

Yeah, I checked. It is the original.

So the BIOS has some code in it to try to either cause problems for the consumer using a 3rd-party adapter, or try to remit possible issues with such adapters, depending on your point of view. Both points of view have a certain validity.

And that code is quite possibly what is causing the screen to go dark on boot. Or it may be unrelated. But it does seem to be a good place to start if I were to try to prove what I am going to say next:

You would think that plugging in the adapter and getting the charge indicator would have the opposite effect, but computer hardware has odd ways of interacting with problems. So --

If you have a notebook PC that boots up with a dark screen no matter what you do, it's possible that getting a new AC adapter will fix the problem, even if it looks like the adapter is powering/charging the PC.

[JMR201911152111: Update, the replacement adapter works well with Ubuntu and MSWindows -- does not cause screen brightness problems.]

Anyway, aside from the adapter and dark screen issues, Ubuntu runs well on this PC.

The steps are outlined on the Ubuntu forums, the link below shows how from MSWindows, and contains links for doing it from MacOS X or a Linux OS, as well:

https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0

So, do I plan on gambling on keeping this machine out of the landfills of some 3rd-world community, or do I send it back and spend about twice the amount on a new ARM-based Chrome OS notebook?

Not sure yet. Still have a couple of days to work out the equations. Very limited budget, both time and money.

I hate being on a budget so limited that I can't do my own small part for the environment.

[JMR201911132000: Fixing the screen controls is in the next part,  Connecting Screen Controls for Video And Audio on Panasonic Let's Note (Defenestration And Deforestation, Part 3), which is moved where this thread probably belongs, to my Defining Computers blog.]