Linux and Acer Aspire 5683WLMI – Fedora Core 6

Posted on by abrugnon

Laptop Specifications

  • Intel Core 2 duo T5500
  • nVidia Geforce Go 7600 128 MB
  • Intel HDA Sound Card
  • Intel ipw3945 a/b/g wifi card (ipw3945 ABG)
  • Broadcom Gigabit ethernet (BCM5787M)
  • Acer Orbicam integrated webcam
  • 2GB RAM – 120 GB SATA HD
  • USB, ieee1394, Infrared
  • 5in1 card reader

Good standard hardware, but the bad surprise is that there is no embedded bluetooth device … 🙁

What works after Out-of-the-box Install

  • -FC6 installs from DVD : OK
  • hard disk partionning : OK. Thanks to Acer the disk is already splitted in 2 partitions and not a lonely big vfat dedicated to window$. So no loss of time to repartition. Dual boot made easy 😉
  • video driver : OK (default Xorg nv driver)
  • LCD screen : OK (Generic display in 1280×800 @60Hz)
  • Ethernet : OK (driver tg3)
  • USB : OK (tested with a rather cheap USB-BAR device)
  • Cardbus/PCMCIA : OK, but my EDGE card seems not working….
  • Acpi works, smart battery is recognized, battery applet works OK. This seem to be an issue on previous models/kernels. Only one thermal zone available for display (CPU temp).
  • CPUFreq is OK too. We are able to force CPU speed and use governors.
  • Synaptic touchpad is recognized, edge scrolling too. The middle button wich scrolls works fine.
  • Hibernate (suspend-to-disk) : works fine

Custom work

  • intel ipw3945

Configure yum for [kwizart->http://kwizart.free.fr/fedora/] repository

yum --enablerepo=kwizart install kmod-ipw3945 kmod-ieee80211

For making this yum installation work, I had to switch to a non Xen fedora kernel (yum install kernel + modifications in /etc/grub.conf)
This incidentally corrected a problem in Cpuspeed applet !
For automatic on-boot automatic wifi setup, make a SysV init script for your ipw345 like this one–  and finished with a classical ifcfg-wlan0 config file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. It works well, excepted a weird message during boot process, saying ipw3945 module not present, so initialisation will be delayed. Will be fixed by changing startup priority to 09 in chkconfig.

 
# chkconfig: 35 09 86
# description: This is a daemon for automatically switching \
#            ipw3945d on to get access to any AP.

Proprietary nVidia Drivers : available via yum (nvidia-x11-drv) ,  not installed yet Update : Installed the proprietary drivers with yum install nvidia-x11-drv. works flawlessly. It’s also possible to install kmod-nivdia for the kwizart repository.

 

  • Desktop Effects : I wanted to try these tricks to upset windows users ;-). For this to work I modified my xorg.conf.

 

 Section "Device"
 Identifier  "Videocard0"
 Driver      "nvidia"
 # Too flashy for me ;-)
 Option     "NoLogo" "true"
 EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Screen0"
 Device     "Videocard0"
 # Mandatory for desktop effects
 Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
 DefaultDepth     24
 SubSection "Display"
 Viewport   0 0
 Depth     24
 EndSubSection
 EndSection

I installed beryl (yum install beryl) instead of compiz as a desktop effect manager .. It looks great, with more effects (too much indeed !). Very fun !

But with Active desktop activated, my screen sometimes goes blinks black for a millisecond …. strange !

– Webcam Orbicam

The new release of gspca (1.00.12) handles this logitech cam.
To install the driver either find a rpm in a repository  or download the sources and compile it from [mxhaard->http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html] (take the gspcav1-20070110.tar.gz archive ). Uncompress it, and ” make && make install “.
I tested it with ekiga, it’s works great.
Be aware that you have to recompile the driver at each kernel update.

{{What does not work}}

 

– Suspend to ram  …. suspends the computer by menu or by FN+F4 key but video never recovers at first sight, I don’t want to use suspend2 custom kernel, so I will keep on testing a bit.

{Update} : suspend to ram works with nvidia drivers, but ethernet does not seem to be correctly reinitialized, I have to take the eth down and up for waking it up ! 🙁

– Multimedia Custom Key Codes (multimedia, browser & mail key, …)

Seems to not work, for the multimedia keys, on the right of the keyboard.

Gnome key mapper only sees FN+ArrowUP (VOL+) and and Fn+ArrowDn (VOL-) and Fn+F8 (MUTE on/off) .. the only usefull keys !!

Update : I tried acerhk kernel module, it succeed in (de)activating wifi device but special multimedia keys are not returned to kernel (neither in xev …) maybe I’ve to wait the new release of acerhk, because the 5680 series can’t be forced…
May work with more tries …..

– Sound Card (intel HDA): Sometimes works, sometimes not .. this seem to be solved in the next ALSA release (1.0.13) but fc6 is based on 1.0.12 … will make a rpm because it’s a quite annoying problem.
Update : Alsa-drivers 1.0.13 is included in the new kernel (2.6.19-1.2895).

Not Tested yet

  • Ieee1394 – Firewire : NOT TESTED, No devices ….
  • Infrared device : NOT TESTED
  • SD card reader : NOT TESTED
  • Orbicam Webcam : NOT TESTED (Update : It works, see above)  , this is a Logitech cam rebranded, look at mxhaard  web page, the next driver should handle this device ..

Output of technical data

lspci

 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02)
 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce Go 7600] (rev a1)
 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
 05:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
 06:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev c0)
 06:04.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB-712/4 Cardbus Controller (rev 10)
 06:04.1 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Memory Stick Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
 06:04.2 Class 0805: ENE Technology Inc ENE PCI Secure Digital Card Reader Controller (rev 01)
 06:04.3 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc: (rev 01)
 06:04.4 FLASH memory: ENE Technology Inc Unknown device 0551 (rev 01)

 

lsusb

 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
 Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
 Bus 005 Device 002: ID 046d:0896 Logitech, Inc.
 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000