AcerAspire1410

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

in Breezy?

in Dapper (current development)?

Installation works?

Yes

yes (see notes below)

Hardware Information

Screen & Monitors

Device

Works?

Bug #

in Breezy?

in Dapper (current development)?

Screen

Yes but wrong resolution (requires Resolution 855)

screen works but wrong resolution

Correct resolution?

No

No: 768x1024 is only option given

Correct refresh rate?

Don't know

Don't know. Looks right

3D Acceleration

Untested

Untested

External monitor works?

Yes

Untested

External monitor - mirrors

Yes

Untested

External monitor - extend desktop

Untested

Untested

Power Management

Battery detected?

Not initially; required changes to table and kernel

YES!!!!

Hibernates?

Crashes even after changes to DSDT table

YES!!!!

Sleep

Crashes ""

YES!!!

Dim monitor on battery

Out box

Yes

Blank monitor on inactivity

Out box

Untested

Lid Close

Crashes

Screen blanks but otherwise remains power on.

Cpu frequency scaling

No

Not sure

Sound

Sound works?

Out Box

Yes

Correct volume?

Out Box

Yes

Hardware volume switch

<fn>+<up>=louder; <fn>+<down>=softer works

<fn>+<up>=louder; <fn>+<down>=softer works

Headphone jack

Untested

Untested

Mic jack

Untested

Untested

Networking

Wired NIC

Out Box

Yes

Wireless NIC

Requires ndiswrapper and neti2220

Not on installation. Requires ndiswrapper and neti2220. Wpa_supplicant

PCMCIA NIC

Untested

Untested

Firewire

Untested

Untested

Bluetooth

Untested

Untested

Modem

Untested

Untested

Infrared

Untested

Untested

Touchpad & Mice

Touchpad

Out Box

yes

Touchpad - Doubletap = double click

yes

yes

Touchpad - Scroll down side

Untested

yes

External mouse - USB

Out Box

Untested

External mouse - Serial

Untested

Untested

Docking Station/Port Replicator

AC through replicator

Untested

Untested

USB

Untested

Untested

Serial

Untested

Untested

Parallel

Untested

Untested

External Monitor - VGA

Untested

Untested

External Monitor - DVI

Untested

Untested

Modem

Untested

Untested

NIC

Untested

Untested

PS/2

Untested

Untested

Additional Hardware

Fingerprint reader

Untested

Untested

CD/DVD drive

CD-ROM: Out Box

Yes

PCMCIA cards

Untested

Untested

Parallel Ports

Untested

Untested

Card reader(s)

Untested

Untested

Function and other keys

Fn key

Operation

Keycode

Works?

Bug #

in Breezy?

in Dapper (current development)?

+ Space

Out Box

Untested

+ Esc

Out Box

Untested

+ F1

Out Box

Untested

+ F2

Out Box

Untested

+ F3

Out Box

Untested

+ F4

Out Box

Untested

+ F5

Out Box

Untested

+ F6

Out Box

Untested

+ F7

Out Box

Untested

+ F8

Out Box

Untested

+ F9

Out Box

Untested

+ F10

Out Box

Untested

+ F11

Out Box

Untested

+ F12

Out Box

Untested

+ 1

Untested

Untested

+ 2

Untested

Untested

Other special keys

Key

Operation

Keycode

Works?

Bug #

in Breezy?

in Dapper (current development)?

Key

Untested

Untested

Wlan LED

Turns on Wireless

I think it requires acerhk

I think it requires acerhk (i.e. I didn't test it before installing acerhk)

email (0xec)

programmable

ditto

ditto

web (0xb2)

ditto

ditto

ditto

"e" (0x9f)

ditto

ditto

ditto

"P" (0x97)

ditto

ditto

ditto

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.

LaptopTestingTeam/Old/AcerAspire1410 (last edited 2010-02-27 13:19:45 by 94)