I just wanted to provide an update since switching from Submarine/Ultramarine about two weeks ago. I’m back on MrChromebox, currently with Fedora Gnome. Week one I was running Ultramarine.
Suspend/sleep works excellent. I have no excessive battery drain issue, and I have not had to apply any tweaks either. Battery only drops approximately 3% - 4% overnight.
I no longer experience a double login on resume, which was only ever annoying anyhow.
Camera works but isn’t really a concern for me, so I haven’t messed with it much.
Keyboard backlighting still fails to initialize after extended periods powered off (an hour or longer, I think). A simple reboot isn’t enough to bring it back, I have to power off and use the physical power button to power back on.
Tablet mode triggers automatically now, I no longer have to use a manual toggle. I used @seaturtle tablet mode script, in the Submarine guide linked in my original post, modified for kernel 7.x and so on. This disables keyboard, keyboard backlighting, and touchpad.
I am experiencing touchpad reinit failures on resume. Rebooting fixes the issue. I experienced these with the Sub/UM setup as well. Flipping to tablet mode and back also resolves this issue (this didn’t work on Sub/UM for some reason). We created a system user service to disable/re-enable the touchpad like tablet mode does, but it runs automatically after logging in. It seems to be working well, but I did have to reboot after sitting overnight last night to get the touchpad to initialize properly. This is the first time in two weeks that flipping to tablet mode failed to fix it.
I only deployed the system user service for touchpad resume earlier yesterday and then installed keyd later last night. I suspected keyd was causing shutdown hangs that I experienced with Sub/UM and then again with MC/UM, which is partially why I went to Fedora, to see if it had something to do with any of Ultramarine’s tweaks. I still haven’t experienced and hang ups while rebooting or powering off, which I almost always experienced after extended uptime — hangs stopped when I started shutting down between sessions instead, which made us wonder if it was related to whatever corrupts touchpad state during the reinit failures. We still suspect keyd may have been the actual culprit behind those hangs, though — I only installed it again last night, so it’s too early to say whether they’ll return.
Now, it looks as if my tp resume service or keyd are having issues with my tablet mode tp reinit trick. Or, it might be coincidental. I will continue monitoring the situation for now.
Otherwise, this has been the smoothest setup yet. Battery life is noticeably better than my original MC/FG install, without any of the tuning I used to have to do. Audio, tablet mode, everything else configured and working well, and with only three fixes applied.
- WeirdTreeThing’s
chromebook-linux-audioscript - ectool - lets scripts talk to the embedded controller for things like keyboard backlight control
- The tablet-mode-handler script — originally from seaturtle in the Submarine guide, but updated for kernel 7.x since the
cros_ec_tabletmodule was removed