I realize there are a few posts about the Smartbook hanging up or freezing from time to time.

Mine too! so i Took the time and Tried to find the issue myself.... and new post since i don't want to hijack others posts...

I noticed that when using WLAN it kept freezing up.
The router used is a German Fritz Box with WLAN channel set to 11.

Short time opening a Web Page and Browsing for a bit works.
But if you for example wget files above 400mb it kept freezing up between 30mb to 90mb (like downloading gentoo-stage3 or rsync the portage tree). I tried downloading those files onto a USB Hard-drive, it did worked at first. Was kinda awkward to link the apt-gets download cache to another drive, but i was able to install huge files.

That changed a while back and now that freezes up too. Those Problems do exist while on Battery power and Plugged in.
Also the Connection keeps dropping and forces me to manually reconnect.

Now the fun Part is that it seems to be Linked to the network. Copying a 16gb backup image via dd onto the internal flash drive works while the Kill-switch on the side is used. Tested with Debian, Backtrack and the preinstalled Ubuntu (gentoo chroot never managed to emerge fully).
I noticed the bottom side of the Smartbook getting kinda Hot when i just let it stay frozen for 5 - 15 minutes, on the left side below the second Battery Lock Switch.
Interestingly it works longer till it freezes if it cooled down a while
and I am not getting Smart from the log files. Its like there was never a crash.


Bought at genesi-europe
ps: i also tried the efikamx-updater as last hope. no changes.

are you talking about grabbing files over wifi or 3G?
if it's wifi what image/kernel version are you using currently?

just normal wifi.
currently using the armhf: Linux efikamx 2.6.31.14.27-efikamx #1 Tue Feb 21 15:43:17 UTC 2012 armv7l GNU/Linux
here a texfile dpkg list of all installed packages: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29793615/efikamx/versions
(its too long for code or pastebin)

Those freezes can happen randomly but are triggered when apt-get downloads or i download files with a chance of 80%.
For example, i just installed xchat, first time it froze, second time it worked.

Ok, I'm currently working on packaging compat-wireless
(updated wireless driver) for Debain. it might be interesting to give that a try and see if its really a hardware problem or just something weird with the crappy wifi driver in the 2.6.31 kernel.

I haven't experienced anything quite as bad as this but I am curious. I should have something soon since that is one of the things I'm working on today.

try installing http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/ ... _armhf.deb by downloading it and running dpkg -i on it as root.

after re-booting you should be running the new compat-wireless version of the wifi driver. let me know if that locks up as well. you will know if the new driver is running by running lsmod and looking for rt2800usb

This is an experimental package so far, but should run fine on the Debian armhf image.

It does install halfway and shows up in lsmod.
however no network at all, i guess it got something to do with:

"WARNING: could not open /lib/modules/2.6.31.14.27-efikamx/modules.builtin: No such file or Directory"

Creating this folder dosent do a bit.
Maybe there is something buggy with the efikamx-armhf-20120226.img.xz i used as install.

Ok, this looks like this is my fault, I just tested this on a clean image instead of on an image I built compat-wireless on and i get the same results as you.

I'm not quite sure why yet though. it seems to be complaining about not being able to load firmware but
even copying the firmware from a machine with the new driver that works onto a clean machine with the package installed fails.

however if you dpkg -P compat-wireless you should be back to normal after a restart (you may have to force re-start it)

Sorry about that.

Ok, I think I figured it out. there is a udev rule plus a udev script that needs to be installed.

I'm currently building a new package with this included and this time I will actually test it on a clean image instead of just trusting that it works on my dev box.

I will make another post when I have a working package uploaded.

Ok, I think I got it working now. just re-download the same package at the same URL.

its md5sum should be 8e3e46cca47de6a5aeb69b1ce0f39d14

and it should work this time around, it works on the clean image that the previous package didn't work on at least.

Many Thanks.
folder error still, but it works.
Have not managed to crash that Smartbook yet. But networks keeps loosing connection.

You can ignore that, it's just depmod -a being run.

Did the wireless connection drop before with the old driver? I know I had just the opposite at home.

Once I switched to a new router the old wireless driver kept dropping my connection. with the new driver it stays connected. let me know if you can crash it.

it might be interesting if you can test against a different access point as well.

In either case getting the output of dmesg might be useful to see if there's any odd complaints from the hardware.

Works so far, about 5 hours of useless downloading and no freeze. Just few connection losses till it wont reconnect after about 7-8 hours without reboot. - Then after a while this is the only output dmesg gives.
But a reboot fixed that, however it seems to occur in the same pattern as the Freezes did..?