I recently replaced my 14" Asus L406 with a 12" L210, but the L210 has a 18mm key pitch which hurts my hands. 19mm is typical, even for a 12" laptop. Bummer. So I'm tired of getting mildly burned by Asus, when Asus doesn't even want to admit it makes the budget laptops I'm buying. So I decided to enter the Temu lottery. I have no idea what I will get, or if it will be usable. All I know is:
Name "RNRUO2025". Price $151.80. 1920x1080 display. 14". Keyboard has dedicated physical page up / down buttons. Ryzen N4000 (lol). 8GB / 256GB (insane). 5000 mAh 2-cell (37Wh) battery. Ultra-thin. It looks very similar to the L406.
We'll see what actually arrives. The uncertainty is a turn-on.
It came today!
On the outside of the laptop, there isn't much. On the bottom, it says "intel INSIDe Made in China Input: 12.0V [DC] 2.0A". It has a QC sticker that seems to say it was built in June 2024. And a SN sticker. And a little door that says "M.2 2280 SATA SSD", which is indicative of something I really like about Chinese engineering -- they provide the information you actually want. No need to guess or measure, it says what sort of M.2 slot it is!
The intel INSIDe sticker looks like a comically poor knockoff. But apparently, that's just what the Intel logo looks like since 2020.
It has HDMI, 2x USB-A (with "SS" USB 3.0 logo), a DC barrel jack. On the other side, microSD, USB-A (no SS logo), ethernet (!), headphone, and a Kensington(?) lock.
It boots up into some sort of Windows....is it pirated or authentic? I don't know how to tell.
To get into the BIOS, I had to hold the power button for 10 seconds to hard power off, and then again to turn it on. And while it came up, I pressed ESC F1 F2 F3 DEL rapidly. Not sure which one of those did the trick. It's a fairly standard-looking American Megatrends BIOS, with a date 2025/03/13, so apparently the laptop is very new. It says it has 12GB (!) of RAM, "SATA SSD0: TWSC TSC10N256 (256GB)" and a "CPU Flavor GLK Notebook/Desktop", which I guess is consistent with Celeron N4000 (Gemini Lake).
First bad news...despite having plenty of space, its keyboard has about an 18.25mm pitch?? So the whole experiment might be a wash from the perspective of getting me a laptop to use. It does have the extra column of Home/PgUp/PgDn/End keys!
It gives me a kind of conundrum because if I want to return (unlikely) or resell or give it away, probably the recipient would appreciate having Windows, but even just to play with it I want to install Linux.
Also, the keyboard isn't flat...it appears to have a low spot around the ":;", or maybe it just rises at the right side. I can't imagine that I care but it's the only blatant sign of low quality.
I got it to show the BIOS screen instead of hiding it behind an "intel INSIDe" banner, and it says DEL and ESC are the keys to go into BIOS config. In actual fact, it is ESC.
It makes a high frequency noise which is well within the threshhold of hearing at a reasonable distance. Thankfully, only when in the BIOS!
There is absolutely no name or branding anywhere, other than "intel INSIDe".
It was a little bit hard to make it boot off the USB stick. I'm not sure why. It seems like, among other things, you have to use the USB 2.0 port on the right side of the laptop, and set "Full Initial" USB support in the BIOS, and have the device inserted before going into the BIOS to change the boot order. Overall this AMI BIOS seems pretty clunky.
Linux /proc/cpuinfo says it's a Celeron N4020. And free says 8GB. So I don't know why the BIOS reports 12GB?? And /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full_design reports 38Wh, which would be 7.6V*5Ah. So it matches the advertised 5000mAh.
Screw it, I'm just gonna install Linux. The Devuan installer is working pretty well, but it could not initialize the wifi. It wants "regulatory.db". I don't remember how I worked around this last time -- is there a general purpose partition at the end of my USB stick that I put this sort of thing on? -- but I'm always working around something like this, it's no big deal. But instead, I simply plugged in an ethernet cable!
I got Devuan installed and it's going well except it's to the point where it would be really handy if wifi worked so I could set up the VPN (which I configure along with the wifi, at the same time), but the iwlwifi driver isn't working. It's loading the firmware and then getting:
iwlwifi 0000:00:0c.0: Can't parse empty family 8000 OTP/NVM sections iwlwifi 0000:00:0c.0: Failed to read NVM: -61
Stabbing around in the BIOS, I find Chipset -> South Cluster -> CNVi -> Country Identifier is set to 16720, which is 0x4150 'AP'. I am changing it to 0x5553 'US' 21843. No effect.
Tried deleting iwlwifi-9000-pu-b0-jf-b0-46.ucode so it falls back to iwlwifi-9000-pu-b0-jf-b0-38.ucode, but I get the same errors.
Tried disabling UEFI Networking in the BIOS. No effect.
Tried Chipset -> South Cluster -> GLK MRD -> L850 (was Intel Wireless-AC 3165). No effect.
Tried custom kernel 6.1.131, same failure.
Tried a live Linux Mint 22.1 image (sometimes this gets lucky), same failure.
Tried module options "11n_disable=1 disable_11ac=1 disable_11ax=1" and separately "bt_coex_active=0". Tried "blacklist btusb". No effect.
Tried Linux 6.14.7. Same.
Tried disabling CNVi in the BIOS. It simply made the PCI device disappear.
It seems like the failure to find an NVM is the underlying problem. Did they simply fail to program an EEPROM before shipping it to me? There is a kernel module option nvm_file=xxx to provide one. I wonder if it's really missing, why it's missing, and where I might find one.
It is able to read NVM sections 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12. So it fails on 0, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11. If I understand correctly, that means I'm missing REGULATORY, REGULATORY_SDP, MAC_OVERRIDE.
So I found the error message for "empty family 8000 OTP/NVM", and that complains if there is no REGULATORY/REGULATORY_SDP, or if there is no SW. But there is SW, so it's the missing REGULATORY that's causing the trouble. I can believe my own system is weird, but I'm surprised Linux Mint didn't work past this. It seems like really low-hanging fruit, for me to have debugged it by looking at the kernel source.
Anyways, the solution seems like apt install wireless-regdb and then building cfg80211 as a module instead of compiling it into the kernel. That way, it initializes after root (/lib/firmware) is available.
That didn't work:
cfg80211: loaded regulatory.db is malformed or signature is missing/invalid!
I used update-alternatives --config regulatory.db to change from "debian" to "upstream", and now I don't get any errors about regulatory.db on boot up. But it still doesn't work. I need to find out whether the kernel is even able to use regulatory.db this way.
I determined that the iwlwifi driver has a stubborn insistence on getting its regulatory information from the firmware NVM, instead of from the cfg80211 regulatory.db. I decided the solution was to use the nvm-file option to load up a fake REGULATORY section, using the channel mapping on my working other laptop to seed it. But on a lark I tried simply hacking it to accept that the section is missing, and start each channel with flags=0 and lar_enabled=true. Here's the patch: https://galexander.org/x/iwlwifi-patch-20250522-1. Very braindead approach.
Anyways, it worked! It starts up and "iw phy" shows that all of the channels are disabled, then after "iw reg set US", the channels are reasonable and it works fine as a wifi client! I don't know if this is brilliant on my part but I'm taking the W. I'm curious what upstream will think.
So now I can set it up. The screen has much darker blacks than the L406. It is indeed 1920x1080. Everything is a little bit yellowish, though. Oranges are blown all out of proportion. For the time being, I've done
xrandr --output eDP-1 --gamma 0.8:0.8:1.0, basically just bring out the blue a little bit. It's close enough that I'll probably never think about it again.
The screen's bezels are impressively small. It's actually a little disconcerting -- my eyes can fall right off the edge of the screen.
The keyboard actually seems fine. I need to sit down with a ruler but somehow it feels much larger than the L210's problematic keyboard. It bounces a good amount but my debouncer seems to work fine on it. It's doesn't have the L406's poor 3-key rollover behavior. The only frustration with the keyboard is the arrow keys are slightly further to the right than I am used to, so there is a bit of re-training ahead for me. But I will have to re-train to use PgUp/PgDn (instead of Fn+Up/Dn), anyways.
I wonder if the real problem I have with the L210 is that it sits too close to my belly. It might be angles instead of key spacing that screws me up. That would point to a lasting difficulty with 12" laptops. Who knows, I may even wind up sitting at a desk again someday -- hah.
I haven't had a single problem with the touchpad yet. I haven't thought about it at all -- "just works." Its button is a little bit firm I guess.
The speakers are merely alright...the L210 apparently set a new high score that will stand for a while. They just aren't very loud.
The microphone is connected to the USB webcam, rather than to the sound card. And for some reason it only supports capturing in "stereo". So it's just a little bit harder to work with but I will adapt.
Too early to tell but if the battery monitor is any good then it seems to indicate that its power usage is overall more like my L406 (which is good) than the L210 (which was bad). So I expect I won't hardly think about the battery again for a couple years.
The plastic case is fine. It is very similar to the L406. It has rubber feet that go the whole width of the laptop, which I think is probably brilliant, but it is kind of off-putting when carrying it. But the nice thing is, they obviously don't cover any screws!
The hinge may be a weak point. It is fine but if I shake the laptop around (I am extremely abusive to laptops) it seems to be *slightly* more floppy than what I'm used to. If it loosens up over time then it could be a real problem. But they don't usually so it's probably fine.
The webcam is 640x480. Maybe it's just a fluke of some software changes but it's the most reactive webcam I've used in a while. The image is a little out of focus towards the edges! It works alright in daylight and is very dark in indoor light (but it doesn't seem to be particularly noisy, so I guess it's just missing some auto-white-balance sort of feature that usually compensates poorly for darkness).
I don't know when I'll bother to open it up, but I'm optimistic about what I'll find...though I have some concern that maybe the wifi is soldered on (it is a pidgin PHY specifically designed to be integrated with the Celeron N4020 SoC). I don't know if I'll be able to buy a replacement keyboard or battery. OTOH, I had good luck with a replacement battery for a "Pritom" tablet -- just search for the part number on the battery itself. Not sure that'll be plausible for the keyboard though? (because it's integrated with the case) Knock on wood. I would hate to find that $150 temu laptop is less maintanable as well as more disposable.