MNT Reform #000158

works

audio, display, ethernet, keyboard, nvme, pcie, sdcard, trackball, usb, wifi

doesn’t work

Touchpad clicking was erratic and didn’t work for all three mouse buttons. I didn’t want a touchpad anyway (it came with the used unit), so I replaced it with the optical trackball module 2.0, and modified it to fix a design flaw peculiar to the 2.0 version using instructions provided by mnt.

batteries

The unit shipped with a set of 18650 LiFePo4 3.2V 1800 mAh batteries, which the seller believed might be going bad. U.S. vendors were all out of stock, so I took the opportunity to buy a replacement set of 2000 mAh batteries from ENERprof, which exhibit better battery life than their 1800 mAh counterparts, but were also painfully expensive. In the end the original batteries worked fine.

nvme

Transcend TS512GMTE220S

wifi

Intel 6205, iwl driver

   ; bind -a '#l1' /net
   ; echo 'key proto=wpapsk essid=XXX !password=YYY' >>/mnt/factotum/ctl
   ; aux/wpa -2 -s XXX -p /net/ether1
   ; ip/ipconfig ether /net/ether1

Stretching the WiFi antenna down under the trackball/touchpad greatly improves reception.

audio

   ; reform/audio       # provides /dev/audioctl and /dev/volume

screen brightness

   ; reform/pm
   ; echo lcd 33 >>/dev/light  # reduce by half

keyboard oled module

This used unit came with a partially broken OLED module. Some pixels worked, some pixels were dead. That sucked, so I installed a replacement module.

keyboard

I have now installed the latest keyboard 3.0, which includes a PC-style, staggered layout. It shipped with standalone firmware installed, which required flashing it from Linux to make it work with the laptop. That was easy, but a little bit annoying, since I now had to un-install the new keyboard, re-install the original keyboard, re-download the 2GB Debian sdcard image from the MNT website, boot the Reform from it, then apt install dfu-programmer (which of course required setting up networking). After all that the flashing process took approximately three seconds, including plugging and un-plugging the USB-C cable. Then it was time to un-install the old keyboard and re-install the new keyboard. The best part about all this is that the process worked flawlessly on the first try, so I wasn’t forced to discus the laptop through the plate glass window of my office.

shortcuts

   ; reform/shortcuts </dev/kbdtap >/dev/kbdtap

Hyper+F1/F2 decreases/increases LCD brightness, Hyper+F7/F8/F9 skips to the previous track, (un)pauses or skips to the next track in zuke(1), Hyper+F10 (un)mutes the audio, Hyper+F11/F12 decreases/increases “master” volume. Optionally, a single step amount can be set with -l for LCD light level (default is 5) and -v for volume (default is 3). Values can be negative to essentially swap the decrement and increment keys.

games

This machine is really too slow to enable sound in 9front’s native video game emulators. Playing games is fine, but if you roll with -a, it’s going to stutter. A lot.

data

plan9.ini, sysinfo, termrc, bench9

complete system rebulid: 317.60u 163.15s 295.28r

doc

buy, community, faq, ifixit, reform(1), reform school, sl/mnt