Lafité IV 14” and Slackware

[damgou]

Hi folks,

I recently bought a Lafité IV 14” laptop that I intend to use with Slackware Linux.

TL;DR: No problem with Linux on that machine provided the kernel is recent enough.

Here are the interesting bits of the specs:

Chassis & Display
Lafité Series: Aluminium Chassis: 14" Matte Full HD IPS LED (1920 x 1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i5 Quad Core Processor i5-10210U (1.6GHz, 4.2GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
INTEL® HD GRAPHICS (CPU Dependant) - 1.7GB Max DDR4 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
1st Storage Drive
1TB SEAGATE 7mm SERIAL ATA III 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 128MB CACHE (5,400rpm)
1st M.2 SSD Drive
256GB ADATA SU800 M.2 2280 (560 MB/R, 520 MB/W)
Bluetooth & Wireless
GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 (2.4 Gbps) + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options
1 x THUNDERBOLT PORT (USB-C) + 2 x USB 3.0 PORTS
Keyboard Language
LAFITÉ SERIES SINGLE COLOUR BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD

Now about the compatibility with GNU/Linux and especially with Slackware: I have installed Slackware64-current, as it was on 1 November 2019. There was no issue during the installation itself.

Post-installation, there was the following issues:

a) The default UEFI-compatible loader used by Slackware, elilo, turned out to be completely unable to boot anything on that machine. It seems to load the kernel and the initial ramdisk successfully, but nothing else happens after that. This is easily solved by switching to grub, which has no problem booting the system.

b) The kernel found in -current as of 1 November (version 4.19.81) is from a branch that is probably a little bit too old already for this machine, as it lacks several drivers, particularly for the graphics and wireless cards (resulting in a complete inability to start X and to connect to a Wi-Fi network). However, with a more recent kernel (I tested a 5.2.2 from July 2019), everything seems to work flawlessly.

For users of other distributions: I have tested only Slackware, but I assume that, provided your distribution of choice uses grub (which AFAIK is the case of most distributions beyond Slackware) and comes with a fairly recent kernel, it should run just fine.

I will update this thread if I happen to run into any further issue, but for now, the Linux compatibility of this machine looks good.

 

[damgou]

So, after about 10 days of using this laptop, I can confirm that its Linux compatibility is in fact excellent.

Specifically, all of the following items are working flawlessly and “out-of-the-box” with a vanilla kernel (as long as it is recent enough, as stated in my first message):

• * communication devices (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth);
• * multimedia devices (graphic and sound cards, webcam, HDMI output);
• * SD card reader;
• * all sleep modes (suspend-to-ram, suspend-to-disk, suspend-hybrid);
• * most Fn+FX keys (such as Fn+F4 to control the backlit keyboard, Fn+F3/5/6 to control the sound volume, Fn+F8/9 to control the screen brightness).

The other Fn+FX keys (Fn+F7 to switch between internal/external screens, Fn+F11 to turn off all communications, Fn+F12 to enter sleep mode) don’t work “out-of-the-box” but this is easy to fix with some custom ACPI handlers. Same for entering/exiting sleep mode upon closing/opening the lid.

I have not tested the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) yet, but the kernel seems to recognize it (presence of a /dev/tpm0 device), so I assume it will work as well.

A few other random remarks beyond the topic of Linux compatibility:

* Battery life seems to wander between 4 and 6 hours depending on usage, consistent with the advertised value of 5 hours.
* The laptop is quite silent under “normal” load; under heavy CPU usage (e.g. when compiling), the noise level obviously increases but remains quite supportable. Funnily enough, it seems that the fan is triggered more easily by heavy disk usage than by CPU usage.
* The chassis remains remarkably cool in all circumstances, even after several hours of non-stop CPU-intensive computation. The only part that becomes noticeably hot is the rear bottom half (where the fans are), but even there the heat is moderate compared to other laptops I have used.