2014 Razer Blade (14") & Linux

Hi folks. When my blade comes Monday I plan on trying my hand at dual-booting it with linux (I do scientific computing by day, and most of my tools are linux-based). I thought I'd start this thread in case anyone else tries the same in the meantime and has anything to report on the process. I'll certainly post my progress as I go.

 

I'm definitely interested. Do a lot of mri/ct processing using MATLAB, numpy, scipy, etc. Are you planning to partition the Hardrive or run from an external? I wonder how much access to the BIOS Razer allows.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

I'm hoping to partition.

 

I'd be interested to see how this turns out. I currently own a 2013 Blade 14" and am disappointed to see that while Ubuntu 14.04 works pretty good, the touchpad is incapable of understanding multitouch gestures. Apparently the issue stems down to the implementation Razer has used to get the touchpad to work.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Razer uses a Synaptics touch pad. If so then its really the lack of Linux driver support for those features which would cause them not to work. I haven't heard Razer had done anything crazy with their touchpads. That said you may be able to find a synaptics Linux driver for another device and force install it on the blade.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

Hm, I'm having trouble getting it to boot an ubuntu 14.04 live usb (created with the pendrivelinux.com Universal USB Installer). It shows up in the boot menu (as "UEFI: VerbatimSTORE N GO 1.00"), but when selected, the screen goes black briefly then off briefly then boots into windows. Nothing in the BIOS settings seem to be pertinent, but possibly I'm missing something?

 

Fixed it. In the BIOS, in the "Boot" tab, I edited the "CSM parameters" section to have "launch CSM" enabled and made all other options "Legacy only" (not really sure if these are all necessary, but it works and has no detrimental effects otherwise).

So far, everything seems to be working fine, including the touchpad tap-to-click and the touchscreen.

 

Doing some more thorough system checks, finding that:
- nvidia card not being seen automatically (will try explicitly installing nvidia drivers next)
- keys to increase/decrease screen illumination not working
- keys to increase/decrease keyboard illumination not working

 

Oops, mistakenly installed the 32-bit version of ubuntu; installing the 64-bit version now and will re-test everything...

 

Next bump: while the i386 version of 14.04 installs fine, when I try to install the amd64 version I get a kernel panic on the first reboot after the installation. The error message is "Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init = option to kernel". Rebooting in advanced mode yields the following right before the kernel panic: "Starting init: /bin/sh exists but couldn't execute it (error -8)"

Anyone have any ideas what's going awry here?

 

Two questions:

* MBPr Late 2013 which has a PCIe SSD had to have NCQ disabled in order for the laptop not to freeze for 10 seconds every few minutes. Some later kernel patch was disabling NCQ by default. I am not aware what is the current state of the issue but I want to ask if you have any I/O performance issues of full system freeze with Blade 2014 in Linux.
* What is the exact SSD model in the top tier version?

Thanks

 

Re-creating the live USB using rufus instead of the pendrivelinux tool yielded an install that worked fine. Back to testing what works...

 

So here's what I've noticed doesn't work so far (on 64bit Ubuntu 14.04):
- fn keys to increase/decrease screen illumination
- fn keys to increase/decrease keyboard illumination
- any type of trackpad scrolling (two-finger & edge)

An annoyance is that I had to modify a bunch of the appearance, cursor and font settings because everything was way too small at first. Chrome is unusable for lack of HiDPI support, but firefox can be tweaked to look ok.

Oh, and I was able to get the nvidia drivers installed just fine, so the GPU is being used properly now.

 

lack of scrolling on the trackpad appears to be a kernel bug (detecting the trackpad as merely a mouse), so I submitted a report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1315360

 

How comfortably usable is Ubuntu without trackpad scrolling? Can touchscreen scrolling be used comfortably instead? I really hope I will be able to make Ubuntu my primary OS, but issues like this could make it frustrating.

 

Not very sadly.


Mike, if you want some drivers for the trackpad with scrolling and tap to click, someone's been working on them here.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173356&p=2