DSE gnuLinux Laptop

Acer Aspire 4315 + Jaunty Jackalope

Today:

In 2008, 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've fixed that.

This page documents my personal experiences with "Jaunty Jackalope" (Ubuntu 9.04) on this machine.

Preamble

Ubuntu 9.04 is out now. Get yours from releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/

Installation

The current edition of Ubuntu is 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). 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 updates suspend hibernate restart ethernet *	compiz-fusion + buttons + modem multimedia + DVD +

+ Can be enabled in post-install.

Note: Multimedia companies are reluctant to discontinue DRM and DVD encryption, and connexant refuse to release their hardware specs. Acer are closed mouthed 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?

The surprise here is the reappearance of "compiz" to the "not working" list. More below.

4315-Specific Bug Reports

AFAIK: None outstanding.

Post Install

Stand by. This next section will involve enabling the non-working sections. The procedure should be about the same as the 8.04 and 8.10 notes so I'll focus on the bits that have changed..

Outstanding issues modem.

Compiz/Fusion

This is the 3D desktop and special effects. Back in 7.10 these were disabled because of instabilities in the free software intel driver when it was used with i965 hardware acceleration. This time, there is a complex bug in the X-Windows server which freezes the screen when used with the intel diver and i965 graphics.

Official Notice.

A workaround has been included with Jaunty to mitigate the effects of this bug. At time of writing I haven't seen it occur - and I've been trying.

You can enable the 3D effects if you deblacklist the driver. If you find you get bad freezes, you have to re-blacklist until a fix is out.

It amounts to the following entered into a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.config/compiz/ && echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

[update] The bug status has changed to "fix committed" - which means this is no longer a problem. I've kept the notes above in case someone has installed from an old image.

ACPI

Suspend and Hibernate reported working since 2.6.27-generic (Intrepid Ibex) kernel.

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 built-in wireless card is autodetected and configured out of the box. The network manager detected the whole street full of wifi nodes without fuss.

Buttons

The acer-acpi solution stopped working sometime with 8.04 - however, sinci the 2.6.26 kernel code specifically has been included 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. The situation is so unreliable that I have removed the "fixable in post-install" flag from this entry. To my mind this modem is a lemon. By now, there should be no 4315 users relying on it.

Multi Media

Multimedia codecs are slightly different from previous versions, see the Ubuntu 9.04 notes for details. 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

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.

Conclusion

There is so little to do it is almost embarrassing to maintain a page. I'll track the outstanding issues to the next release (9.10) but, an open-source linuxant driver notwithstanding, I don't expect major improvements.