Thursday, August 5, 2010

MSI Wind Top AE2220 and Ubuntu Linux




Just purchased a MSI Wind Top AE2220M and intend to run Linux on it (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS). Can't find much useful experience on the combination available online - hopefully it is a good pair. If you are interesting in seeing how they get along, keep in touch, I will post my experiences in a few days.

Update: A few weeks have passed without me giving my experiences, luckily not because of problems, but it sort of worked right out of the box.

As some of the comments below highlights the wireless works better after running an update. I got it to work on the original install by tweaking some of the settings on my AP (frequency and setting it to g-only). After the update it did better and I restored the original settings on my AP. Still it does not seem to operate on 802.11N. For me 802.11G is fine (for now).

The multi-touch screen does not work out of the box either. I did not buy this machine for this feature anyway, and i do not like finger marks all over the screen, thus i do not plan to do anything with this. My guess is that Ubuntu 10.10 will solve this one, as it is one of the focus areas of that release.

Actually - the only manual improvement i did to it was changing the Boot-splash to the screens native resolution. No practical difference in doing this, but it makes the (very short) boot look very good :)

You have to edit this file:
/etc/default/grub

Add the following two lines:

GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1080x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

Then run:
# update-grub

I would absolutely recommend this machine if you are looking for something to run Linux on.

Thats it! Hope you enjoy this machine as much as I do.

Update:
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick has a sound related problems. To fix it:

# sudo echo "options snd-hda-intel model=auto" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
# alsa force-reload

I am also glad to report that the touch screen i working out of the box in Maverick.

6 comments:

  1. Same situation. Can't get touch or sound to work. Wireless required a full update to latest patches in 10.04. Would be very interested if you get touch or sound to work.

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  2. Here sound works out of the box on kubuntu 10.04 and 10.04.1. The wireless network only after updates and I haven't tried the touch screen.

    I do have problems with some random crashes and am unsure if it is wise to install the nvidia-binary driver. Any thoughts?

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  3. Have been running the nvidia-binary driver without any issues. The machine has performed flawlessly so far (no crashes and i do not reboot every week)

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  4. Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.

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  5. It is a very informative and useful post thanks it is good material to read this post increases my knowledge.
    Keep Sharing such a great things always!!

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  6. I bought this computer on sale a few months ago. It worked straight out of the box with 12.04Alpha.

    Unfortunately, I never booted to Windows and didn't even know that it _had_ a touchscreen. Now I'm interested in setting it up, but nothing registers using lsusb or lspci. Quite odd.

    Any suggestions?

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