Chuwi Minibook X N100 and Aurora

17 Jan 2025 by cthos
1372 words

Turns out Universal Blue Aurora works great on a Chuwi Minibook X, with only minor issues! But, let’s back up - what’s a Chuwi Minibook X, and why did you get one and put Linux on it?

The Minibook X is a very small laptop with a hinged touchscreen display that’s reiminiscent of Netbooks of yore. But with actually decent performance for the price. It also comes with 12 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a 1920x1200 10.51” display.

The killer feature for me is the size, it’s extremely portable with a keyboard that’s still usable for someone with fairly large hands. Here’s a quick size comparison of the Minibook X on top of my Macbook Air 11”, which itself is on top of a 13” Macbook Air M2.

Just look at how small it is! It’s several inches shorter than the Macbook Air 11” with a higher resolution display.

It retails for $399, but it’s regularly on sale for $350 or less.

Before I decided to pick this up, I watched a ton of videos on the topic, but I think this one was the most informative, which covers both the Minibook X and its larger sibling (with the same specs, otherwise).

I really like it. It’s extremely compact while still managing to be comfortable to type on. The keyboard feels nice (though not as nice as the MacBook Air 11”), the touchpad is a little small but perfectly serviceable. The display is great for the price, and it gets quite bright. The display is glossy, though, so it’s a bit hard to use in bright light.

The N100 is a really solid processor for this thing, and I don’t have any performance complaints for what I’m using this for (mostly writing). You can also do some light software development on here too, docker runs just fine.

You can even do some light gaming, if you’re into retro games or lightweight stuff. I tried RuneScape 3 and it worked perfectly well. Of course, Game streaming works just fine as well — it’s equipped with Wi-Fi 6 for fast wireless connections.

The biggest issue, for me by far, is that Windows has gotten extremely bad, they’re shoving ads into everything, adding Copilot wherever they can, rolling out Recall in places it doesn’t belong, and yeah. So, I definitely did not want another Windows Laptop sitting around.

Hence, “can you put Linux of some sort on this thing?”

When I first started researching this thing, a couple of themes kept popping up: The display is broken in the Linux Kernel between 6.6.15 and 6.9, sometimes the Wi-Fi drivers are broken, and slew of other things.

Good news is Sonnyp came to the rescue by documenting every issue that will commonly occur along with a support matrix. It was very useful for this process.

So, I set out to try my favorite Fedora Silverblue variant (besides Bazzite): Aurora DX.

Getting to the boot menu involves smashing F7 on this machine until you get the boot list. This is also how you get to the BIOS, but there’s not a lot in there.

The most immediate problem when booting from the USB installer is that the display is rotated. You see, this is a vertical display that’s rotated in the software. There’s not a way to fix that during installation, so you kinda just have to deal with it.

The second issue I ran into is the one that I keep running into with Universal Blue variants: it can’t delete a BitLocker volume. To deal with that, I booted into a Linux Mint live USB and used GParted to wipe the hard drive clean. After that, installing Aurora DX was straightforward besides the rotated display.

After the first boot, basically everything worked out of the box. No issues with the Wi-Fi, the touchscreen is functional (though I’ve yet to try a pen), the camera even “just worked”.

So, on to that display rotation, I had to do several things to get it to be rotated properly when it boots. Well, apart from Grub. There’s apparently no way to get Grub to rotate properly. Which isn’t a huge deal.

Please note that autorotation doesn’t work, there appear to be some workarounds for that, but I’m not using it so I’ve not bothered to try.

Open up the display settings, and then change the device rotation to the proper rotated orientation. That’ll fix the rotation when you’re logged in. However, that will not apply to the lock screen that occurs after boot.

To fix that we must:

Go to Global Theme > Login Screen (SDDM). There will be a button in the top right hand corner called Apply Plasma Settings... Click that and then Apply, which will copy the display rotation settings.

There are two potential kernel args that affect the initial screen rotation as the machine boots (including the nice little splash screen thing). The first comes from that Sonnyp’s Github repo, and the other is from the ArchWiki.

I’ve set both of them using the following commands:

rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing video=DSI-1:panel_orientation=right_side_up
rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing fbcon=rotate:1

I don’t know if it’s one or both of those that fixes the issue, but the combo appears to be working.

What good is having an ultraportable laptop without taking it to uultraportableplaces? So far I’ve taken it out to a few places and I have to say the amount of table space it occupies (when compared to a laptop, not an iPad or the like) it’s fantastic.

Here’s it at a coffee shop:

Functionally it’s like a 10” iPad with a full-fledged operating system, with a slightly worse keyboard experience. And a definitely worse battery experience, probably.

So, one thing that keeps getting mentioned in descriptions of this machine is the tiny (for a laptop) battery. It does in fact have a very small battery, but I was still getting roughly 5–7 hours of estimated usage when I was out working on this and other blog posts. The longest I’ve used it continuously has been 2ish hours, and after that I still had about 70% of the battery remaining, which wasn’t too bad all things considered. This is way more than my refurbished MacBook Air, and it has the added bonus of a USB-C port to charge with s, so can carry around a small battery pack to recharge it should that become necessary.

So, it’s a little chonky at right about 2 pounds (0.91 kg). That’s just a smidge over my 10” iPad with the keyboard cover on it, and less than an M4 iPad + keyboard cover. Still, for the size / convenience ratio, I think I like it better than the iPads for general utility. It’s not nearly as powerful, but it can also handle a full development environment locally so… there’s that.

I love this thing! The only major test left will be if the pressure-sensitive pen works in Linux, but if it does, it’s liable to see more use than my 13” laptops for shorter trips.

chuwi linux laptop