Testing Linux Mint for Solutions to a few Puppy Issues w/ New Hardware

[vtpup]

I'm using the new high powered notebook listed in my sig with F-96 CE v.4. I've installed a late huge kernel (also in sig) to get touchpad working, plus some additional firmware to get its network card working. Problems were to be expected because of the overall newness of the hardware.

Issues left to resolve were not deal breakers, but fixes would definitely be improvements. Remaining issues are:

1.) Touchpad problems: cursor hesitation and freeze-ups. Cursor jumps while typing causing placement errors.
2.) Sound problems: no speaker sound, headphone volume settings get muted after reboots
3.) screen problems: in WINE using Google Sketchup 7 or 8, dragging a box to select momentarily blacks out the screen

Problem #3 was pervasive in ALL puppy and dog versions tried and multiple versions of wine from 3.x on up to 9.3. Out of curiosity I decided to try a different major distro to see if the problem was common to them as well. I selected Linux MInt 21.3 Cinnamon (the most recent cutting edge version intended for modern hardware). If this version worked for #3 it might be possible to work out what the difference was between that and all Pups/dogs/Wines tried.

I dd'ed the Mint ISO to a 16 GB thumbdrive and booted it up. The kernel version was 6.5.0-14-generic and the WINE version 6.0.3. WINE was installed via apt.

The results:

Wifi worked OOTB.

1.) Touchpad problems were no longer evident. I examined /usr/shere/X11/xorg.conf.d/ There was NO 70-synaptics.conf file leading me to believe Mint doesn't use the synaptics driver. Instead it uses 40-libinput.conf. I think this might have direct application to F-96 CE, and am trying it out now.

2,) Speaker sound did not work. However the voiume and source controller was much better implemented and did not automatically mute headphones. It was also a lot easier to use -- much better interface.

3.) Google SketchUp 7 and 8 did not have the black out problem when drag-selecting an object. This is the first time I have seen that eliminated in this computer with any platform and any version of WINE.

I'm very hopeful about this last, since I have to use a Qemu virtual instance of Windows 7 to run SketchUp, rather than Wine. It appears Mint's particular build of the 6.5 kernel plus firmware (and openGL, Mesa, Vulkan?) has what is needed to resolve this specific screen problem.

(I have tried alternative kernels 6.6.8 and a 6.8.1 LoLat with Fossa F96-CE v4, but apparently something is missing and neither alone solved the problem.)

[dimkr]

Ubuntu 20.04 and distros derived from it are too old for a laptop like this. What you need is a distro that uses libinput (by using the X.Org libinput driver, or by not using X.Org), with a recent kernel, recent Mesa, SOF firmware and preferably with PipeWire. I think BookwormPup64 should tick all boxes.

[vtpup]

F96-CE works best on this laptop so far and libinput touchpad is being tested on it now. It's been working perfectly for a day, so far.

I also have Bookworm64 along with 6 other pup/dog distros as well as EasyOS frugal installed on this laptop.

Bookworm64 does have its own problems, OOTB touchpad: right click doesn't work, left click drag doesn't work. Synaptic installed wine is 64 bit version only, yet 700+ megs. Running winecfg in terminal warns to add multi-arch and 32 bit wine. Those instructions then fail.

You can't uninstall Wine completely after because Synaptic installer can't uninstall the dependencies it installs. Loss of a good portion of 3/4 gig. At this point, it doesn't appeal to me to get tied to a distro with an installer that can neither install nor uninstall a common program.

I think Bookworm64 is a really nicely made distro, but additional program installation is tied to Debian's truly ancient concepts.

Example:

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