HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsOthers

Revision 1 as of 2005-05-28 20:38:19

Clear message

HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsOthers

Notes on installation and compatibility of Ubuntu with laptop computers made by some other companies less known.

Averatec

Averatec laptops information has been moved [HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsAveratec].

Chiligreen

Chiligreen Agilitas M7-470K

  • Athlon 64, ATI Radeon 9600
  • Warty: Xwindows doesn't work
  • Hoary Array 3: everythink is working, except Grub Installer hangs, see bug: #6082

Compal

Compal CL-56 (AKA MWave CL-56, XNote Premier Plus, Chembook 2056, etc.)

  • This is a popular off-brand laptop, and is branded under many names including MWave, XNote, Chembook, Fragbook, and more. For reference, it's normally dark blue with a silver stripe around the keyboard, and has a 15" SXGA screen.
  • To install, you need to change the fbcon to mode 770, or the installer will crash. See the help in the installer loader, it has an example of how to do this.
  • Most things work out of the box, except (if you have the internal wifi option), the wifi will be disabled using software lockout. You must install the acerhk module, and then activate it. [http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~tauber/acerhk/ Look here for the module]. You will need to install linux-headers to build it. To activate: {{{modprobe acerhk usedritek=1 autowlan=1 force_series=290

echo 1 > /proc/driver/acerhk/wirelessled }}} You will probably want to place this in a startup script.

  • acerhk is also required if you wish to use the function+volume, mute, and some other laptop special keys.
  • ACPI suspend does not appear to work with Warty and linux 2.6.8. The laptop will suspend, but will not resume.
  • PCMCIA is not tested.
  • This laptop has a Mobile Radeon 9600 graphics chip. Use the fglrx ATI drivers if you need 3d acceleration.

ECS

ECS G551 (Combo Drive Model)

  • Pressing F12 crashes the system.
  • Sleep & Hibernate (Disk and RAM) works via CLI.

  • Burning of CDs inside Nautilus is supported.
  • ATI fglrx configured without any problems (M9).
  • Realtek RTL 8180 Mini-PCI Wireless is only possible with Ndiswrapper.
  • ICH4 AC97 softmodem not yet configured, but will work most likely.
  • Flash drives are detected without any problems.
  • Digital Cameras work fine as well.
  • Overall, everything works fine if tweaked properly.

eMachines

Note: the M68xx series includes the 05, 07, 09, 10 and 11 models. What works on one should work on another.

eMachines 6807

  • All works.
  • For the wireless card to work. Just install the ndiswrapper from the synaptic package manger.

eMachines M2350

  • All works except for sound by default.
  • For sound, in a mixer, disable all jack sense and external amplifier switches.

Gateway

Gateway Solo 5300

  • Sound Works (confirmed)
  • Built-in Ethernet works (Xircom something-or-another) (confirmed)
  • LCD Display works (confirmed)
  • Fonts look good. (confirmed)
  • 'X' cursor on by default. Using Option "HWCursor" "false" fixes it. (confirmed)
  • Modem Untested
  • Battery Meter doesn't work. (confirmed)
  • Fn+F4 (Gateway's Standby Hotkey) doesn't do anything. (confirmed)
  • Volume hotkeys (Fn+Home [Mute], Fn+PgUp [VolUp], Fn+PgDn [VolDn]) don't work. (confirmed)

  • Haven't tried external monitor switching yet.
  • USB does work. (as opposed to previous unconfirmed status)

Gateway 4024GZ

  • No sound
  • When lid is closed, system cannot be brought out of suspend (hibernate?) without reboot (X or CLI).
    • *The system responds to the power button when not in X and powers down gracefully. When in X, the
    • *display only shows a blinking cursor and the power button shuts down forcefully.
  • LCD display works
  • Modem untested
  • USB and hotplug work
  • Built-in ethernet works (Realtek)
  • No wifi (built-in Broadcom 802.11G) (ndiswrapper?)
  • Battery meter works
  • Fn+F4 (Gateway's Standby Hotkey) doesn't work.

Mecer

Mecer N223II

Mitac

Mitac 7521

  • Suspend, Modem, IrDA: Untested
  • Keyboard buttons: Not working
  • Sound, Video, Mouse: Works wonderfully

Panasonic

Panasonic Let's Note R3

Panasonic Toughbook R1n

  • network, sound, USB2.0/1.1 ports, graphics, laptop mode and cpu throttling works fine.
  • Synaptics touchpad works and Ubuntu X has support for the circular edge scroll, but you need to activate it manually in XF86Config.
  • ACPI works mostly - battery level, temperature and so on is read fine
  • You need a separate driver to use brightness, volume and the other controls on the function keys. It can be found [http://www.netlab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/~yokota/archive/pcc_acpi-0.8-hy20040929.tar.gz here], and related acpi scripts are [http://www.netlab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/~yokota/archive/pcc-acpi-utils-20041013.tar.gz here], though they need to be tweaked a bit to fit Ubuntu.

  • External monitor output works with a utility called i810switch, available in Universe.
  • Suspend to disk works on Hoary (3/16/05).
  • Suspend to ram does not work; it never comes back from sleep.
  • PCMCIA works.
  • Modem, SD card reader untested. Modem is unknown, and indications are that the SD reader will not work.

Samsung

Samsung X15

Basically works out of the box. Video, audio, touchpad all fine, USB mouse works too. Wireless LAN needs ndiswrapper, but then works fine.

CPU throttling works, but battery indicator does not work (using Warty, at least).

Function keys (brightness, volume, battery indicator) don't work, I haven't investigated yet.

Haven't tested PCMCIA, modem, external monitor, or suspend yet.

Sharp

Sharp Actius MM10 (aka PC-MM1110)

An amazing number of things are supported and detected automatically by Ubuntu (4.10 Warty): audio and video chipsets, XFree86 configuration, Synaptics touchpad, and the built in wireless device all work just like that. It's great! But with some tweaks we can get it to work even better:

  • WinXP Dual Boot

Not that you would, but if you'd like to keep the existing WinXP install you're in luck! The factory installed file systems are Fat32 and can be resized with GNU parted. Windows, in its anti-competitive ways, was continually overwriting my grub-installed MBR. The fix on [http://geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html this page] helps.

  • Touch Pad Sensitivity

The default settings were a bit too hectic for me. Add these values to the synaptics InputDevice section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

        Option  "MinSpeed"    "0.05"
        Option  "MaxSpeed"    "0.20"
        Option  "AccelFactor" "0.0002"
  • Suspend to RAM / Hard Disk

Both can be made to work. I basically followed the excellent instructions for ACPI in the SuspendHowto. Suspending to memory (sleep) is easy: do what's in the howto, but in addition you need to rmmod the orinoco_pci and orinoco modules first thing in your suspend script (maybe there are better drivers for the prism 2.5 chipset out there? orinoco won't let you scan for access points etc).

I have the problem that the screen won't turn off, but go an unhealthy bright white instead. My workaround is to sleep a few seconds so I can turn off the screen manually with Fn-F11 before it suspends Wink ;)

Suspend to disk (hibernate) is way cooler of course. SuspendHowto has all the information. You need to re-compile the kernel, but don't need to get any patches. Add the same orinico lines to your hibernate.sh script.

  • More Info

[http://web.mit.edu/jjl/www/mm10/ This person's page] has more technical information.

Sharp Actius MP30

  • The Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 release works well. I had to add a GRUB kernel option of i8042.nomux in /boot/grub/menu.lst to get the touch pad to work, but I was able to plug in and use a USB mouse right away.
  • I have not been able to get the built-in wireless to work yet, but a guy named Carl got it to work here: http://www.cameltail.com/projects/sharp/, so I'm still hopeful. He was using Slackware 10.0 and the madwifi driver.

  • Power management is a little weird, but I haven't tried tweaking it yet. The fan still comes on just like normal when the screen is closed and the processor should be idle.
  • I have not tested the modem or the display adapter yet.
  • The play-a-DVD-without-booting feature works fine.

UPDATE: The DVD-playing-without-booting feature got hosed somewhere. I installed the Hoary preview, and it still worked afterwards. Then I installed SuSE 9.1 and Hoary 5.04, and it doesn't work any more (which is actually fine with me).

More info at http://pingswept.org/index.php?p=57

Targa

Targa Visionary 811 2800+ (aka Lidl-laptop)

Most things work, some troubles though:

  • Wireless: GPL'd driver here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400/.

  • Touchpad: Didn't work for Warty AMD64. Works with version in Hoary though.
  • Modem: Haven't tried in Ubuntu. Works with sl-modem-daemon in Debian though.
  • Video: I haven't got fglrx working yet. DRI is missing.

Uniwill

Uniwill N244II0 (LAC LUCGM Centrino)

Almost Everything Just Works with the Warty installer. It's rock solid. X.org from Hoary gets DRI working, and OpenGL is working well enough.

The Smartlink modem (AC'97) requires the 'sl-modem-daemon' and the 'sl-modem-modules' built to match the kernel. This modem does not work with the intel8x0m ALSA driver, only with the slamr module. After building and installing that module, it dials out just fine. My laptop has an Atheros based Wifi card in it (optional equipment) that works great with the Madwifi drivers. The built in ethernet card is well supported by the e100 driver and works flawlessly.

With a little effort, suspend to disk works too, using a kernel patched with the Software Suspend patches from http://softwaresuspend.berlios.de/ and the associated 'hibernate' script.

ACPI S3 suspend to RAM does not work at this time, in Linux 2.6.9. I don't know for certain if it's a BIOS problem or a Linux ACPI problem, though I suspect the latter. The screen remains dark after attempting to resume, and I suspect that what's wrong is that the video board hardware state is not getting restored.

This particular laptop came with a 1400x1050 built-in LCD, even though Uniwill only mentions it as a 1024x768 display. (Not all N244II0 laptops have the larger screen.) The VBIOS does not have a mode defined for the higher resolution, so out of the box, X will not run higher than 1024x768. I found a program called '822resolution' (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/apoirier/) that allows me to modify the VBIOS tables, adding a new mode. In order for this to work in concert with software suspend, it must be done from an initrd, so the new mode is in the BIOS when X comes back to life. Scripts that set this up, to be placed in /etc/mkinitrd/scripts, can be found at http://www.laclinux.com/~karlheg/. The display is kind of fuzzy at 1024x768, but at its full 1400x1050 native resolution, it's crisp.

The synaptics touchpad works fine, though I prefer to carry a USB mouse. Hotplugging USB devices (USB v1.1 and v2.0) works great, no issues whatsoever, no special boot options required.

There are a few flaws in this laptop model that I should mention. With older versions of the BIOS, polling the battery status via ACPI too often would cause keyboard and pointer interrupts to get dropped. That made the pointer jump around randomly and it would even push GUI buttons sometimes. A BIOS upgrade swats the bug; a workaround is to not poll the battery state very often -- shut off the Gnome panel battery applet. The other flaw is that when there is a full 1Gb of RAM installed, and Linux is compiled with highmem support, the machine moves at a snails pace. Without highmem support, you cannot access all of the RAM. The workaround is to add "mem=1008M" to the kernel boot command line, to get almost all of the RAM available. More than that makes it slow way down. (Anyone know why? Please explain it to me! (KarlHegbloom))

From KeithBachman Fri Apr 29 04:34:41 +0100 2005 From: Keith Bachman Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 04:34:41 +0100 Subject: eMachines M6807 architecture used? Message-ID: <20050429043441+0100@https://www.ubuntulinux.org>

What architecture did you use when testing your M6807? i386, or amd64?

I'll be putting it on this weekend, if I hit any snags I'll post them here. I have an M6805. The entire series (only difference in models is CPU speed, amount of RAM, HD capacity, and a DVD/CD-RW or a DVD burner) has the same motherboard, but has some tweaks. I'll work on writing it up for later addition to that section.