Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: Pablomme
• Make: Philips
• Brand: Freevents
• Model: X59
• Bought: June 2007
• Website: this is a Philips-rebranded Dixons computer sold in the UK. Dixons does not seem to offer much (any?) online info about its custom computers. NB, Dixons is the company behind PC World, Currys, The Tech Guys, Partmaster, etc, and may offer very similar laptops branded differently

Important: this is a 64-bit machine, but all the stuff below applies to the 32-bit version of Ubuntu. I haven't tried the 64-bit version.

Current Issues

• Problem with card-reader driver (sdhci.ko): installation hangs. The problem appears to be that the driver does not recognize the reported device ID. Not fixed as of 9.04, but can be bypassed.

See bottom of page for installation info.

System Info

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.66GHz
• GPU: Intel Mobile 945GM
• Memory: 1GB
• HDD: 100GB, SATA drive

As required:

$ sudo dmidecode -s system-manufacturer
DIXONXSP
$ sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name
To Be Filled By O.E.M.
$ sudo dmidecode -s system-version
To Be Filled By O.E.M.

Hardware details

Notes

Bug #187671 prevents using the liveCD to install the system. This is related to the O2 Micro chipset for the memory-card reader.

If you have a previous Ubuntu version running on your X59, the only thing you need before upgrading to 8.04 is blacklist the sdhci module by issuing echo "blacklist sdhci" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist at the command line; thus the new kernel won't hang your system.

ADDED 03 Feb 2009: Fresh install of 8.10,

• Follow instructions below as relevant for 8.04, but additionally, when install completes, reboot. It will likely freeze.
• Reboot using the CD, and go to rescue mode. Go through the wizard, and eventually you'll have the option of a command prompt with your root filesystem mounted (whichever filesystem is relevant). Choose this.

• You need two commands echo "blacklist sdhci" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and echo "blacklist sdhci_pci" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

* Remove CD and reboot, should now work as normal

To do a fresh install of 8.04,

• Download the alternate CD from the download page and boot from it

• After selecting your language, hit F6 and enter the option sdhci.blacklist=yes, and press Enter. The kernel will complain that it does not understand this option, but debian-installer will pick it anyway (thanks to Arne Fitzenreiter for pointing this out)

• Proceed through the entire text-mode installation normally. Done

Everything works out of the box, except the card reader (clearly). No restricted drivers are needed, since Intel has open-sourced both its video and wireless drivers. Compiz 0.7.4 still doesn't support the alpha blur effect on this card, but it runs smoothly otherwise.