Acer Aspire S5

[eranid]

Hi,

I've had the same problems with Acer Aspire S5:

1. Screen was without colors, with noise, on startup (closing the lid and reopening fixed that temporarily)
2. WiFi was shaky - worked sometimes but disconnected alot.
3. Bluetooth detects no device.

I just updated to Ubuntu 12.10 and 1 and 2 got solved (! thanks guys!),
But the bluetooth is still not working.

The link you gave, Riskable, is to a thread dealing with the WiFi as far as I can see.

Where can I find instructions on compiling and installing the driver for bluetooth?

Thanks, this thread literally saved my computer, btw. I was going to get rid of it and buy a Dell...

[soulnet1]

Hi,

Using riskable instructions I was able to get xubuntu up and running without any extra configuration than what he posted. Everything I tried so far worked, including sound, mic, webcam, USB, touchpad with 2 and 3 fingers taps as right and middle click and 2 finger swipe to scroll (I guess XFCE is taking care of it, I did nothing and it was working). The video corruption problem only came out on the first boot and was solved by suspending and coming back, but after doing the automatic updates I did reboot once or twice and it did not happen, so I guess it is corrected without any manual update. Bluetooth was not working and I did not try thunderbolt, but for Bluetooth, I figured I'll just wait until 13.04, and I have no need or use for the Thunderbolt port.

@riskable: First of all, thanks for your instructions, they were life saving and easy to follow. I would recommend that after

After booting up the first time into 12.04.1 you'll want to add 'acpi_backlight=vendor' to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable in /etc/default/grub so that Linux can control the backlight (LCD brightness).

You mention that update-grub and reboot are necessary. Also, I don't know weither some other step may need reboot or reinitialization of some daemon of something that I did not notice, but there are a lot of far-from-expert ubuntu-lovers like me out ther whose lives are made much easier with this kind of extra remarks. Luckily I realized I had to do it fast, but its happened to me before that it takes quite a while to figure this kind of details out.

Now, on to the problem:

My wifi is not working great. It works, it has good speed (up to 150 Kb/s) and I was able to download several hundreds of software packages. However, I'm getting quite a few disconnects, especially when the signal is not maximum (had been connected without a single disconnection with the same APs and almost the same physical connectino with my previous laptop, and the signal seems high enough for it not be the problem). Its not so much that is unusable, but is annoying being reseted every half an hour on average (it does reconnect fast in most cases, and never took more than a minute of retrying to be back up). When plugged in it seems to work better, although is a different AP (at home vs at the office), I'll try to plug in with the AP at the office to see if it changes.
had anyone else had trouble with this?
Is it possible that the power savings for the wifi in riskable's script are not working 100%? (I have the trouble with the AC connected also, so this is a wild guess)
also, when this computer disconnect, at least some times, my old HP laptop also disconnects (and the HP never disconnects if the aspire is suspended or off).

Any ideas? Maybe other wifi driver I might try? Just wait for 13.04 to resolve everything for me?

Thanks

[soulnet1]

update: I've been trying to update to 12.10 to fix the wifi disconnection problem, but I'm getting:
E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Not really use why, apt-get update, upgrade, dist-upgrade, -f install, and the like I've tried show no error.

Any help will be appreciated, thanks.

[soulnet1]

Update: After doing ppa-purge I was able to upgrade to 12.10 (although it took like 12 retries due to the wifi being disconnected while fetching) and now the wifi problem seems to be solved completely. Bluetooth is still not working though.

[andberge]

Hei, anyone else got problems with the "magic flip" just poping open whenever, almost at random.

Thought first it was an usb problem of some sort, tho all usb devices are in suspend and auto mode.
Not really sure what causing this problem, was hoping someone had this encountered this problem and parhaps had an solution.
Or perhaps direct me where the problem might lie.

Running ubuntu 12.04. Laptop-mode has been installed, but other then that more or less out of the box as a standard installation.

[soulnet1]

Hei, anyone else got problems with the "magic flip" just poping open whenever, almost at random.

I have seen this problem being reported for the computer, even in standard windows installation. The hardware is supposed to do that automatically if the computer heats up, to provide additional ventilation. If it is happening when you are heavily using the processor, then it might just be the expected behavior. If it happens at random, I would say its likely that the hardware is misreading the temperature or your processor is being overused due to some misconfiguration. Are the fans always working fast when this happens?

EDIT: To answer the actual question, it has not happened to me, although the couple of times I was installing a lot of upgrades, which was the only processor-intensive task I've done so far, I opened it myself for ventilation (I thought it may make the fans a little more quiet).

[andberge]

Yea that might be what causing the problem, if i now can even call it a problem. Seems to happen around 50 - 60 degrees I believe. Tho so far only happened with the charger plugged in, tho this might be because the laptopmode set the freq. down once on battery mode, so less chance of overheating then.

Must say tho, this magic flip thing on this computer is rather silly, almost made to be broken at some time, sounds awful too

[riskable]

I upgraded to 13.04 (Kubuntu) yesterday and everything is working wonderfully. The Bluetooth works now! I was able to perform an "hcitool scan" and see my phone and my wife's Mac (which is all the way on the other side of the house--not bad range!). I wonder if the mouse works... I may have given it away. I need to rummage through some drawers.

In regards to Thunderbolt: I just tested plugging in my Thunderbolt ethernet adapter and nothing happened. Not even a line in dmesg. I'll test coldplug (booting with it plugged in) soon.

[riskable]

I just wanted to chime in to say that I've upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and everything is still working fine with the same exact caveats as with 13.04:

• The Thunderbolt port only works if you have something plugged in at boot.
• The Fn+<left/right arrow keys> keystrokes to control display brightness do not work.

That last bullet is really quite surprising considering that the display brightness key combos worked fine in Ubuntu 12.04.

[mitch-hasbox]

I just wanted to chime in to say that I've upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 and everything is still working fine with the same exact caveats as with 13.04:

• The Thunderbolt port only works if you have something plugged in at boot.
• The Fn+<left/right arrow keys> keystrokes to control display brightness do not work.

That last bullet is really quite surprising considering that the display brightness key combos worked fine in Ubuntu 12.04.

Actually the last bullet (controlling the brightness with the Fn keys) works just fine. You need the following in /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

and then just run "update-grub" and reboot.

Everything works just fine with this laptop.

Mitch