Hi,

yesterday I got my Smarttop. I started it and everything seems fine. But after I typed in my information (like computername or userpassword) there was a black screen for over an hour. I restarted the smarttop, but nothing happened. There was the black screen again. So, I decided to install the OS again. I used the .img from this site. This time, everything was fine. But after the loginscreen of ubuntu the operations of the smarttop are very very slow. The smarttop have a cpu-usage from 100% the whole time without using an application.

And now, I don't know what I can do. Are there any options I have to set or something else? I hope somebody can help me.

Greetings
René

Hi René,

That CPU load sounds definitely abnormal. Can you show the result from running the command 'top' when the system is in such bogged-down state?

Re the screen going black, would you please show the EDID portion of the kernel logs:
Regards,
Martin

Hi Martin,

I try to get the system to this state for a half hour, but it doesn't happen. Maybe it's good. But the system is stil very very slow. To open "google.de" with firefox takes 10 seconds (Firefox is already open). But is it normal, firefox use more then 80% of the cpu when I open a webpage?

Greetings
René

Hi René, what exactly do you use to monitor the CPU usage? If you are interested in a graphical tool, you might want to install the GNU Krell Monitor. The built-in "System Monitor" is not a good choice.

Hi Andre,

thank you for your advice. I will try later. But before I have another Question: When you (or anybody else) use your smarttop, what is the feeling? Is the moving of the windows flowing or hashing? Maybe it's an indicator if there is a problem with my hardware.

Greetings
René

The following text is the same as above, but translated to german, because Andre is from Germany too.

Hi Andre,
erstmal danke für den Hinweis. Ich werde es sobald wie möglich ausprobieren. Jedoch würde ich gerne wissen, wenn du dein Gerät das erste mal benutzt hast, wie war das Gefühl dabei? War die Fensterbewegung flüssig oder hat es ein wenig gehackt? Weil ich hab nach einer frischen Installation, dass die Fensterbewegung halt etwas hackelig ist und ich denke, da kann was nicht stimmen.

Grüße
René

Hi René, abhängig von der verwendeten Monitorauflösung kann das Verschieben von Fenstern durchaus wie beschrieben anmuten. Viele Besitzer des Smarttop bevorzugen allerdings die gewohnte Gnome-Umgebung und nehmen dies entsprechend in Kauf. Andere hingegen wechseln auf leichtfüßigere Desktopumgebungen wie beispielsweise XFCE.

Um die prinzipielle Funktionalität der Hardware zu testen, seien die auf PowerDeveloper bereitgestellten Technologiedemos Debian ARMHF, Multimedia-Dock und Android ICS empfohlen.

Also das Debian ARMHF hab ich schon getestet und das lief sehr gut. Ich werde wohl nochmal mit Android testen. Aber kann ich erstmal von ausgehen, dass bei mir alles in Ordnung ist und ich sollte vielleicht die Desktopumgebung wechseln. Ist es dann eigentlich möglich das Smarttop auch als MediaCenter am Fernseher zu nutzen? Weil wenn das so "ruckelt" kommt denke ich kein richtig gutes Gefühl dabei auf? Gibt es dafür etwas was auf das Gerät zugeschnitten ist? (Ich bezweifel nämlich das Software wie das XBMC nicht laufen werden)

So, here are some screenshots of the "top"-output from my smarttop:




I hope they will help you to help me ;)

So, I installed XFCE and it is much better. But I will have to test it a little bit more (for example with a mediacenter-software). Are there any suggestions, which mediacenter I should use or can I take any software?

Greetings
René

Glad to hear.
If you visit the PowerDeveloper Projects section on this website, you can see that Genesi has donated hardware for the purpose of adapting XMBC to the Efika MX smarttop. However, there is no version that you can install and use as of yet. Hopefully, this will change eventually.

If you look for media center applications in the preinstalled software center, you might stumble across Moovida, which was formerly known as Elisa, uses the GStreamer multimedia framework and is based on Python. Unfortunately, while you can install Moovida 1.0.9, it fails to open a window for some reason and then just quits.

That being said, for generic video playback the preinstalled (Totem) Movie Player should be perfectly fine but its user interface was not optimized to be used with a remote control.

I have been impressed with Bodhi Linux on the Efika Smartbook. It uses the Enlightenment desktop with Ubuntu and it only took up about 1.8 GB of space on the hard drive or sd card. The stock Gnome install that comes with the smartbook took up 2.6 GB of space. Less bloat means faster performance. Bodhi Linux has a Light Office option which takes up about 85 MB of space while LibreOffice takes up around 190 MB of space. If you are using your Efika Smartbook mostly for traveling, perhaps Light Office is all you need. Note that Bodhi for the Efika Smartbook is in early development. To get a better idea of how it works, you need to try it on an x86 machine.