Don’t get me wrong. I like the computer. It’s just that there are issues. Some of those are currently insurmountable.
So, I start this off with some negative feelings and you have to ask how is this article going to turn out. It is hard to say because though this is a nice computer there are issues and it would be nice if I didn’t have to deal with them. Mostly they surround Linux. However that may be, turning to Windows 10 is not the answer. It is far to egregious to use. I’ll either re-purpose this as a dedicated phone system or figure something out.
The basic flaw in this is that this is based on the Intel chipset known as the cherry trail chipset. Intel abandoned development of the drivers for Linux some time ago and hasn’t gone back to resolve it. The end result is that the video has some issues and the sound doesn’t work, at least over HDMI. There’s a new dock for it but that dock is as expensive as the computer itself, thus doubling the cost of the unit. One could make a reasonable decision that if you are going to go buy a $200 unit that you’d want to buy something like the NUC, which doesn’t rely on the bay trail nor cherry trail chipset. Yeah, you have to add some stuff and it doesn’t come with Windows 10. In my case I don’t want to go with Windows 10 so that’s not a trade off.
I ran into the problem the moment I started working on this under Linux. The WiFi at the time worked but with recent updates it is having problems. Research shows that the WiFi chipset has issues going back a while, so the odds of it being resolved are not good.
I had a problem where if I performed a warm reboot the boot process would stop at the grub command line. If I did a cold boot then it would boot properly. Apparently after the update that messed up the WiFi this issue was resolved.
I tried a few things to resolve the WiFi issues. The way it happened was that when I was ssh’ing in there’d be these long delays after a short while. So, I’d type a command on the command line and part way through it’d stop and I’d have to wait, then it would continue and I could type and then it would stop again. Very aggravating. I then decided to look at some other guys issue under windows where he said that he couldn’t play full screen video. I entered Firefox and opened YouTube and began a video. Though it played full screen fine, there’d be the buffering issue. So, I looked at the same video under windows 10 (the version that comes installed on the device) and found it worked fine, no buffering and full screen worked. I reported that to the guy on reddit.com.
This made me think about what would be causing the buffering. I looked at the network details while in Linux and found that it connected fine but it would drop to 1mbps after a very short period. I tested further by plugging in an external WiFi adapter and trying again. Same issue. So, I’d guess that it isn’t the driver, rather it is some issue with the WiFi components in Linux. Very rare issue with WiFi.
I’d purchased a 1gbit USB Ethernet adapter so that I could use a wired cable. I’d had issues with it. What would happen is that Linux would load and it would load the WiFi components but the USB Ethernet adapter wouldn’t get an IP address from the router. If I issued “sudo service network-manager restart” it would get an IP address and all would be well till the next reboot. I figured this out by using network-manager to add the wired connection and save it. I do not know why it didn’t work out of the box. It normally does. I guess there’s another obscure bug that the developers need to address. Also, I decided to blacklist the WiFi driver so that I knew it wouldn’t be interfering with my work.
I then noticed that if I leave the KangarooPC plugged in and on but turn the TV off then the next time I came in and turned the TV on the desktop would not return. I’m working on resolving that too.
Now bear in mind that none of these are typical Linux issues. In the old days there were issues similar and they were prevalent, however they’ve mostly been eradicated. Why these are cropping up on the KangarooPC is difficult to say. However it could be how their bios is configured. In examining the bios settings it became clear that there weren’t enough. Most computers that have bios have lots of settings. This bios only has a few and most of what I want to see is missing.
As the system stands I have asterisk running on it with a phone logged into it. I also have a desktop that works along with universal remote server so that I can use my phone as a keyboard and mouse. I’ll be adding another keyboard/mouse sharing tool soon. I’m keeping it at Kubuntu 15.10 simply because asterisk has issues with Kubuntu 16.04. I’d like to see it working there because 16.04 is an Long Term release (LTS).
As far as stability goes, it is stable and performs well. If only I could get the WiFi, sound, desktop, and Kubuntu 16.04 all working. Over time we’ll see. I’ll try to report back my progress over time.