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I got my hands on a Acer Travelmate 6292 a week ago or so, a really nice peace of hardware. Unfortunally it came with Vista Business, and my mind couldn't endure more that 30 minutes of that system. I have no clue what Microsoft is on about, they were on a decent track.

Anyway, it now runs Ubuntu 7.04 and I'm running into all sorts of trouble. It just is too new. If anyone else here tries to get a *nix system running on santa rosa, I'd like some feedback.

Firstly, video. I've compiled my own 2.6.21 kernel since 2.6.20 that comes with ubuntu 7.04 isn't supported by intels graphics driver from http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org. Secondly, it requires xserver 1.3 so I compiled that and the most up to date xorg to my new kernel. After this I got the video driver running, though without glx working (no 3D acceleration).
After checking around some, I found that libglx didn't get compiled with xorg. Shouldn't it have? What do I have to do to get it working?

Next, sound. No luck at all. I got latest alsa 1.0.14rc4 (see 1.0.14 is out now, will try it later), it recognizes my card, aplay -l reports:

But no sound out of speakers nor headphones. It seem like ICH8 should be supported, but I have found nothing about support for the Realtek 268 codec in this machine.

Now, networking. Works with latest ndiswrapper (1.46 now) but is very very unstable, kernel panics, infinite loops, and complete lockdown after about 40-50MB of transfers normally. The open source intel driver seem to support 4965AGN now, but was hard to install. Will get on this soon. Running a old external broadcom 802.11g card atm.

SD-card reader doesn't seem to be recognized, and I haven't been able to come any further with this.

Webcam is recognized, but doesn't seem to be supported by any drivers in linux. SuYin seem to be the manufacturer of what Acer here calls "Crystal Eye".

Bluetooth seem to work well out of the box, even though I haven't connected it to anything yet.

I believe that covers most of the current state of my laptop. Power management works well and I can use it for most things already, but sound, 3D acceleration, and stable networking would be very appreciated.

If anyone have any suggestions for how to get a santa rosa laptop up running well in linux, please post some feedback.

Not that my two cents is worth anything.

This reminds me of when I tried to get Fedora 1 installed properly on my HP ZE 4500 3-4 years back.
The broadcom wireless card wouldnt work.
The embedded ATI graphics wouldnt even allow for basic 2d acceleration (choppy window movement, dont even ask about 3d)
And the CPU would be running full tilt when off of the plug.

Eventually it broke, motherboard faliure and HD faliure.
Then a month afterward, drivers were released for the wireless card and ATI had some good work behind it's drivers.
Not to mention the frequency scaling finally caught up with my A XP 2500+ which now hapilly resides in a home file server.

Watch it, in a month everything is going to work.

StarkMjolk wrote:

After checking around some, I found that libglx didn't get compiled with xorg. Shouldn't it have? What do I have to do to get it working?

Yeah, and it's enabled in the configure script by default, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. According to the Intel driver page you also need Mesa for direct rendering and DRM modules to get accelerated glx.

Here's my two cents... compiling and installing xorg yourself is a huge pain and difficult to get right and play nice with your distro's packages. If I was in your situation, I'd leverage the fact that gutsy gibbon (the next branch of Ubuntu) already has the right version of the driver and Xorg. You could dist-upgrade your full system to it if you wanted (or install GG Tribe 1), but you can also simply run a mixed system with the few packages you need from the newer branch using a technique called "apt pinning." I use it all the time on Debian to run testing with a few packages from unstable. It's really quite simple and here's how you can do that:

* Make a new file /etc/apt/preferences
* In the preferences file, put:

* Now, edit your sources.list and copy the main and restricted (and others if you want) repo lines replacing feisty with gutsy:


* Now run "apt-get update".
* Now you can run "apt-get -t gutsy install xserver-xorg-video-intel." That will install the 2.0 version of the video driver that supports your video card and it should pull in the Ubuntu version of Xorg 1.3 as a dependency (as well as a few updated packages, like glibc). This should ensure that everything (Xorg, glx, drm, etc.) is built properly and with the right dependencies.

Using this technique, you can also do a "apt-get -t gutsy install linux" and it will pull in the gutsy kernel 2.6.22, so you won't have to worry about using a custom compiled one, either.

The only experience I've had with Santa Rosa and Linux is the Thinkpad T61 (most of the info regarding that can be found on the thinkwiki), but it has a different sound chip (Analog Devices HDA versus Realtek) and most of the models come with the Atheros a/b/g/n wireless that is in the Mac Book Pro and has been supported by Madwifi for some time. The 4965AGN is still a bit of a problem, support-wise. Intel has promised to release a working driver in Q2 of 2007, so... I guess it's "Coming Soon (TM)." Some people have had better success with ndiswrapper, but YMMV (I would always consider it a "last resort" sort of thing).

I might just do that. Though I am quite close to get the 3D acceleration running. It even says "Direct rendering: Yes" or something like that in dmesg after boot, but glx seem to fail very quickly due to not being compiled for the current kernel.
Trying some peaces of gutsy might be the easy way out.

I did some testing with sound and talked to a few alsa-devs yesterday and I'm doing progress. I think I'll hear how good the speakers are with a week.

Too little time to tinker though, I'd really like to do more testing on this laptop.

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

Coldfirex wrote:

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

That would be what gutsy is that bitvector was referring to.

Coldfirex wrote:

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

Yes, that will be what to test. Though I will not pick up the whole release, just the kernel, video, and perhaps sound components. I've tried early ubuntu herds before, they have never been usable for productive work.

But I guess that's the point of alpha releases.

StarkMjolk wrote:

Coldfirex wrote:

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

Yes, that will be what to test. Though I will not pick up the whole release, just the kernel, video, and perhaps sound components. I've tried early ubuntu herds before, they have never been usable for productive work.

But I guess that's the point of alpha releases.

I used both of the 6.x releases in the beta stage on my web server and there were no problems at all. Then again, it's a CLI only machine, so maybe that's part of it.

StarkMjolk wrote:

Coldfirex wrote:

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

Yes, that will be what to test. Though I will not pick up the whole release, just the kernel, video, and perhaps sound components. I've tried early ubuntu herds before, they have never been usable for productive work.

FWIW, when writing up the directions I did an install of the gutsy xorg and kernel on a fresh feisty VMware image and didn't encounter any issues. I can't speak for tracking Ubuntu's development branch, but I've found tracking Debian unstable isn't very problematic most of the time (a few nasty surprises once in a blue moon). Tracking Red Hat rawhide, though... that's for brave people IMO.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

StarkMjolk wrote:

Coldfirex wrote:

You could try the first Ubuntu Alpha release

Yes, that will be what to test. Though I will not pick up the whole release, just the kernel, video, and perhaps sound components. I've tried early ubuntu herds before, they have never been usable for productive work.

But I guess that's the point of alpha releases.

I used both of the 6.x releases in the beta stage on my web server and there were no problems at all. Then again, it's a CLI only machine, so maybe that's part of it.

Betas are one step more polished than alfas. But this is quite off topic.

I can add that http://www.intellinuxwireless.org added some about 4965AGN on 5 June. I will try it out as soon as I get time.

Hi,

I'm actually running with a daily build of Gutsy right now, and I can't get the iwlwifi compiled, but hey - I'm a total n00b.

I would love to hear from you if you get the 4965 running on Ubuntu - sucks to have no wireless, and I have exactly the same problems with ndiswrapper.

cheers

The only hardware that still won't co-operative with my brand new laptop Acer Travelmate 6291 installed with Fedora 7 (2.6.21) is card reader & built-in web camera.

At first, the sound was not out although it was detected as ICH7 family. But i had patched it with alsa-driver 1.0.14 & realtek12 patch script. Both compiled & voila.. the sound finally arise!

While the wifi driver works best with iwl3945 native driver. Also the bluetooth stack & others. Now, only card reader & webcam is giving me mads...

See this link to watch detailed my review of it: http://paparadit.blogspot.com/2007/07/fedora-core-7-on-acer-travelmate-6291.html[/url]