ZBook Studio X360 G5 Linux issues - keyboard, tablet-switch, lower speakers

[MatthiasLU]

This is a collection thread of all the issues I still have running Linux on this device. Overall I am unsure if i should be happy - this is a kind of specialized device and for those vendors often don't have good Linux support - or disappointed because it's almost 2020 and apparently it's possible to buy expensive business-grade from an established manufacturer that don't have good Linux support. Anyway - most things work by now and also most things worked out of the box.

Things I am having still issues with:

Keyboard

Some of the special keys don't work correctly. Namely

• Decrease Brightness results in microphone mute
• Increase Brightness results in microphone mute
• Presentation-button on the right side results in left-alt and left-ctrl
• Answer-call-button results in left-alt and left-meta
• End-call button results in left-ctrl and left-alt

I am not sure how to fix this yet. There's this person who failed to do so.

tablet-switch-"key"

Quite some laptops report when the device is in tablet-mode by sending a "SW_TABLET_MODE" key event and then applications like the "onboard" screen keyboard process that knowing that we're now in tablet-mode.

I haven't seen such a key-event in any of the input devices listed in "libinput".

Lower speakers

Apparently the device has speakers on the bottom - only that they don't do anything. I also don't see any way to .e.g change audio profiles in pulseaudio.

Also things I'd like to see, but are a bit more optional:

• The battery doesn't report any drain
• I didn't see a way to set charging thresholds yet
• Fan control would be nice. They engage so early that one can't even have 1 process using 1 core in a meeting room.

Any help is very much appreciated. These observations are made on (K)Ubuntu 18.04.3 with Kernel 5.0.0-36-generic with up to date packages and "HWE" being used.

[IT_WinSec]

Hello @MatthiasLU 

Welcome to the HP Support Community. Sincere greetings from a fellow Tux user, using Ubuntu/LinuxMint/Debian.

As you probably know, the magic in Linux happens in the kernel. I can notice that you use the 5.0 kernel which ships by default in latest LTS K/Ubuntu. It is way too new and may be you can try the previous 4.15 LTS or 4.18

• Download and try k/ubuntu 18.04 , 18.04.1 or 18.04.2 >> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/18.04.2/release/
• After installation, ensure you hold/lock the previous kernel 4.1x by following these steps >> https://askubuntu.com/questions/938494/how-to-i-prevent-ubuntu-from-kernel-version-upgrade-and-notif...

Any difference ?

[MatthiasLU]

Hi!

Thanks for the quick reply. I thought I had one of the old kernels still lying around and could just boot into it, but there wasn't any.

It's true that a lot of things happen in the kernel, especially lower-level things. But on the other hand a longstanding paradigm of the kernel development is to not break user space and all the things I am requesting are in user space. Also as expressed in the cited answer their paradigm and my expectation is that I can run any newer version of the kernel.

Keys

I made some progress in the forward direction regarding the keys though. The tool "evtest" reports single scancodes for the brightness buttons at least. Permanent mappings of specialized keyboards are handled by "udev", so the way seems to be to create a merge request similar to this one.

Still annoying that those things don't work out of the box on one of the most used Linux distros.

Fans

After talking to some colleagues I think I can drop that point. It seems to be smarter to avoid that the processor even gets that warm rather than blocking heat removal.

High-frequency flickering of non-selected windows and other screens

Beginning of this week sometimes windows which were not selected started to do some high-frequency flickering between the content and plain black. The same sometimes happened to some of the screens also. It seemed like the parts that were flickering were the updated renderings. People with Linux Mint seemed to have the same issue. It seems to be fixed by opening the Nvidia settings dialog, go to "OpenGL Settings" and deselect "Allow Flipping". This was with

• X-Server 1.20.4
• NVidia driver 430.50
• Kernel 5.0.0-36
• No bumblebee, "discrete graphics" setting in UEFI.

No updates regarding the other issues.