Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: DanielODonnell
• Make: Acer
• Brand: Aspire
• Model: 1410C

• Website: http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_1410.html

• S/N: N/A

Current Issues

Negative

Two major issues:

1) Flight 6 hung when I put /etc/ in a separate partition (see below).

2) There is a long blue screen while the partitioner writes changes to the disk in Flight 6 in which nothing obvious is happening and things look like they've hung (of course you know something is going on if your disk LED is working, but it is still pretty scary, I imagine for a newbie). Some kind of graphic or even text saying "please wait while your changes are being written" would be a big help.

Minor issues:

1) The screen darkens more clumsily than in Breezy when focus goes to user intervention windows like "Grant access" or "logout": in Breezy it was a graceful fade; in Dapper Flight 6 (updated to current Beta) it seems to jump in stages.

Positive

Things are much easier to use. In fact easier than you are likely to know, since there are so many websites telling you how to do things by hand that are now in the distro (i.e. make and install ndiswrapper).

Really a very good distro!

Hardware details

Notes

The acer 1410 is quite similar to the 1680, except for the cpu: celeron m (1410) vs. centrino (1680). They do not share the same wireless card, but do share many other drivers.

I'm preparing a webpage describing step by step setup for this. Just need to clean up the notes in my personal wiki.

====Hoary==== Special keys either worked or were easy to tweak in Hoary.

====Dapper (flight 6)====

=====Installation=====

****Serious problems****

First time I installed, the reboot hung at "Mounting root file system". It went to black screen and reported: "*No inittab found \ Enter runlevel:_". This was from a clean install on a reformatted drive. The only odd thing was that I mounted /etc as a separate partition. I then tried reinstalling as OEM (worked, but didn't era oem user or ask for new info on reboot). And then finally using the "install to drive" option without a separate partition for /etc. This time it worked.

I have two quibbles about the installation:

# You get a blank blue screen for quite a while each time the partioner writes to partition. I could see a newbie thinking the computer had hung at a blue screen of death.

# The "Selecting and installing software" bar gives a very misleading sense of progress: at 5% in my installation, it claims it is installing 840 files, which leaves the impression that it will be 100% done after the files are installed. It therefore seems very odd when the percentage bar doesn't move during this whole process then suddenly zips ahead to 17% as soon as it is done. Things then go pretty quickly till 84%. The last 26% seem to take for ever. I don't know what the percentage bar is measuring but it sure isn't time to completion!

====Battery and Hibernation====

Way to go. This now solves some real problems with 5.10 and other distros!

====Touch Pad====

Touch pad is extremely sensitive in Ubuntu (5.10 and Dapper). Much more so than in Windows.

====Wireless====

The wireless is much easier to set up, though there is so much odd and old information out there on the web, this is an area where some current instructions might we worth adding. I also wonder how hard it would be to use a form driven interface asking users what kind of wireless they have--googling suggests there may be about twenty or so main makes of internal wlan cards, with many duplicated under different names.

Anyway, in this case you need to do the following:

1) Ndiswrapper (apt-get)

2) Get neti2220 (available from various places including A802.zip at acer.be: )

3) Install wpa_supplicant

4) Edit /etc/networking/interfaces so that wlan0 is auto load. Here's mine:

 # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system 
 # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
 # The loopback network interface

 auto lo
 iface lo inet loopback

 allow-hotplug wlan0

 # The primary network interface
 # auto eth0
 iface eth0 inet dhcp

 iface wlan0 inet dhcp
 auto wlan0

5) Add acpi=noirq to the boot options. To do this you

a) Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

b) Find the following section and add acpi=noirq at the end of the last line (i.e. after "ro"). Do not uncomment the line:

 ### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
 ## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified
 ## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below

 ## DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs

 ## ## Start Default Options ##
 ## default kernel options
 ## default kernel options for automagic boot options
 ## If you want special options for specific kernels use kopt_x_y_z
 ## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted.
 ## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro
 ##      kopt_2_6_8=root=/dev/hdc1 ro
 ##      kopt_2_6_8_2_686=root=/dev/hdc2 ro
 # kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro 

c) Update the grub loader:

•  sudo update-grub

6) Finally, you need to start wpa_suppliant and wlan0 in the correct order:

•  sudo ifdown wlan0
   sudo wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -i wlan0 -Bwd
   sudo ifup wlan0

7) Using 'wpa_gui' scan for available networks and enter password information if appropriate.