DSE gnuLinux Laptop

Acer Aspire 4315 + Intrepid Ibex

Today:

Earlier this year, Dick Smith Electronics sold Acer Aspire 4315-100508Ci Notebooks with a hobbled pre-installation of Ubuntu 7.10. Despite the artificial limitations, they have sold well.

Since the sales are limited to Australasia, mainly New Zealand, there has been precious little information about them online. Well, I'm fixing that.

This page documents my personal experiences with "Intrepid Ibex" (Ubuntu 8.10) on this machine.

Preamble

Ubuntu 8.10 is out now. Get yours from releases.ubuntu.com/8.10/

Pretty much all outstanding issues besides the modem have been solved already.

Installation

The current edition of Ubuntu is 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I have installed this to my personal 4315 as the main OS. This was a clean install after backing up my personal files. I have not tested the upgrade process.

Initial Results

The following table lists the out-of-the-box functionality. I'm still testing, so some of these entries may change as more information comes to light. Also - details will be added.

Working	Not Working
microphone wifi journal swap compiz-fusion updates suspend hibernate restart ethernet *	buttons + modem + multimedia + DVD +

+ Can be enabled in post-install.

As you can see, this is substantially improved. The final "not working" list can only be "fixed" with the cooperation of the vendors. Multimedia companies are reluctant to discontinue DRM and DVD encryption, and connexant refuse to release their hardware specs. Acer are closed mauthed about their special buttons - though they are not secret - making it difficult to keep up with changing specs. Besides - what should they be mapped to by default?

4315-Specific Bug Reports

wireless network not working [FIXED]
microphone support vanishes on reinstall[FIXED]
suspend to ram reboots on resume [FIXED]

Post Install

Stand by. This next section will involve enabling the non-working sections. The procedure should be about the same as the 7.10 and 8.04 notes so I'll focus on ACPI.

Outstanding issues modem.

ACPI

Suspend and Hibernate reported working with 2.6.27-generic (Intrepid Ibex) kernel. Now tested by me - it's true, it's true! Thanks to Wayne McDougall for this.

Microphone

The microphone is now fully supported. You have to enable the "capture", "mic boost" and "front mic boost" sliders in the volume control. Set both boosts on 100% and capture on about 67% and you'll get reasonable audio capture.

Wireless

The 2.6.27 kernel includes free drivers for the Aetheros chipset, which work.

Utfortunately, the 8.10 release has relegated these drivers to a package offline - so you have to go get them. The proces is as follows:

Deactivate the atheros chipset support in
System > Configuration > Hardware Drivers
Enable the backports repository in
System > Configuration > Software Sources
Open a terminal and enter:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
Get the module to load at startup by editing /etc/modules and adding ath5k to the end of the list.
reboot.

If you are having trouble getting a connection, you may need to troubleshoot your network connection. This process is outside the scope of this document, but there is an Ubuntu Geek article which is helpful.
[Thanks to Graeme Simpson for the link.]

Buttons

The acer-acpi solution stopped working sometime with 8.04 - however, the 2.6.26 kernel included with Intrepid has included code specifically written to address this issue. Untested at this date.

Modem

Linuxant continue to struggle to keep their drivers up to date. I've given up trying to keep track - the consequences when this driver breaks are so dire I cannot recommend you try it for yourself.

Multi Media

Multimedia codecs are handled the same way as for previous versions. Intrepid is using Pulse-Audio for sound, which results in much more effective multi-source playback.

Note: we de not expect restricted multimedia playback out of the box. There are legalities preventing wholesale distribution. However, non-restricted multimedia formats play perfectly. If you have an iPod - suggest you get Rockbox.

Commercial DVD

(Solution Exists - to be tested)
I'll retest gstreamer DVD here but I expect to need totem-xine yet again. Some people suggest the VideoLan Client (VLC) which uses the same set of tools that totem-xine uses.

Tested - works well but some commercial DVDs are odd. Totem will not always play the DVD menu, but if you restart it, then select the DVD from totem's menu, you will get a "playlist" of tracks. One of these will start the movie and there is no rhyme or reason to the ordering where DRM is involved.

VLC will play the menus, but will not always respond to selections. You can play the main title on a DVD by selecting play > disk > DVD instead of play > disk > DVD menu. Older DVDs work fine, suggesting a DRM/format change recently is responsible.

Install Image

The old 8.04 OEM image is no longer available as out-of-the-box support is simply excellent. Thank you to all those people who sent me boxes of disks in support, they have been put to good use.

Conclude

There is so little to do it is almost embarrassing to maintain a page. I'll track the outstanding issues to the next release (9.04) but, an open-source linuxant driver notwithstanding, I don't expect major improvements.