[ Acer Aspire 4315 ] - Installation and Workaround

[tistaharahap]

I am writing this tutorial for people who wants to install Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon on an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop. There are a few things you need to do post installation to enable both compiz and the wireless adapter.

You can do the installation of Ubuntu without a sweat. Just pop in the CD to your CD drive and press F12 at the preliminary boot screen and choose to boot from your CD drive. Install Ubuntu by following the usual methods.

When you boot your laptop the first time, when you have reach your desktop you will notice that the Restricted Drivers Manager is detecting your wireless card inappropriately. I have written a howto regarding the matter to enable the wireless adapter in this following link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662877. For the sake of a complete tutorial, I am copy pasting the instructions in this thread:

1. Remove any ath_pci driver from the RESTRICTED DRIVERS MANAGER 2. Make sure that you have build-essential package installed, if not, fire up a terminal and type in sudo apt-get install build-essential 3. Navigate your way in Terminal to the directory where you downloaded the archive for the driver 4. Type these to decompress the archive tar xfz madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz and cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007 5. Type make to compile 6. Type sudo make install to install the driver 7. Type sudo modprobe ath_pci to insert the driver as a kernel module 8. Restart by typing sudo reboot 9. If all goes well, after you restarted, you will find wireless networks in your Network Manager

The next thing to do if you want to enable compiz, you can do a workaround by editing an executable file. But please remember that by doing so, you won't have any video playback unless you disable XV (hardware accelerated playback) in Ubuntu. If you still want to enable compiz, here's the trick:

1. Fire up terminal 2. Type these: mkdir -p ~/.config/compiz/ && echo SKIP_CHECKS=yes >> ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager 3. Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearances and activate Desktop Effects at the last Tab. 4. If all goes well you will have compiz running. 5. If you want advance compiz configuration (you should), type these in terminal: sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager 6. If you want unaccelerated video playback, run gstreamer-properties through terminal and disable XV.

All other functions with the laptop should work out of the box. Good luck and enjoy Ubuntu

[Flymo]

Thanks, that looks like really useful information - we'll give it a try on our 'development' partition of UbuntuStudio - just in case .
In any event, it's so helpful to find proffered solutions to the driver problems that seem to plague the laptop world.

Would you care to comment on why both Compiz and XV cannot co-exist ?

Best regards, Ben

[greg.harvey]

Awesome thread! Thanks! Just saved me hours of wi-fi pain.

[Mahyar]

Thank you for this information. This is the first time I've ever been able to run Compiz-Fusion.

I wonder whether you can help me get the multimedia keys working with Amarok? You know all the keys on the right with the blue icons on them?

Cheers

Mahyar

[FrancesL]

Originally Posted by tistaharahap I am writing this tutorial for people who wants to install Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon on an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop. There are a few things you need to do post installation to enable both compiz and the wireless adapter. You can do the installation of Ubuntu without a sweat. Just pop in the CD to your CD drive and press F12 at the preliminary boot screen and choose to boot from your CD drive. Install Ubuntu by following the usual methods. When you boot your laptop the first time, when you have reach your desktop you will notice that the Restricted Drivers Manager is detecting your wireless card inappropriately. I have written a howto regarding the matter to enable the wireless adapter in this following link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662877. For the sake of a complete tutorial, I am copy pasting the instructions in this thread: The next thing to do if you want to enable compiz, you can do a workaround by editing an executable file. But please remember that by doing so, you won't have any video playback unless you disable XV (hardware accelerated playback) in Ubuntu. If you still want to enable compiz, here's the trick: All other functions with the laptop should work out of the box. Good luck and enjoy Ubuntu

Hi ..I just followed all this using copy and paste into a terminal, now my Acer has a grey screen and i had to fire up my agian HP to write this...HELP I want ot go back to what it was before I made the changes

[FrancesL]

Originally Posted by FrancesL Hi ..I just followed all this using copy and paste into a terminal, now my Acer has a grey screen and i had to fire up my agian HP to write this...HELP I want ot go back to what it was before I made the changes

Update: I have managed to restart laptop by using power switch, I have used add/remove to remove compiz, I went into command line and reversed the instruction there. hopefully that is all enough

[tistaharahap]

Originally Posted by Flymo Thanks, that looks like really useful information - we'll give it a try on our 'development' partition of UbuntuStudio - just in case . In any event, it's so helpful to find proffered solutions to the driver problems that seem to plague the laptop world. Would you care to comment on why both Compiz and XV cannot co-exist ? Best regards, Ben

There's an entry at compiz' wiki saying that due to a driver problem, when compiz is enabled if you try to play videos with XV enabled, it'll simply crash the application trying to play the video. Been looking around for solutions without success. It seems to problem is native to the x3100 Intel GMA graphic card.

[kutjara]

I used your method to get wireless working on my 4315 under Hardy beta (for which many thanks). Everything worked fine until I rebooted the machine, at which point it forgot all about the wireless card, until I manually typed the modprobe instruction again, after which wireless was back. The situation repeated for every subsequent reboot.

While functional, having to retype modprobe at every reboot would soon get tiresome, so I did a bit of searching around, and found a solution in an unrelated thread.

simply type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and then append the line:

ath-pci

to the end of the text already there.

That's it. Hardy will now bring up the wireless card at boot-time.

I didn't have to do this under Gutsy, so I'm assuming it's something they've changed with the new release.

Once again, thanks for this invaluable tutorial. I'm loving how fast and functional this pedestrian little machine is with Hardy. My MacBook Pro and fast Windows desktop machines are getting very jealous that I seem to have abandoned them for this $350 wonder. They'd better not cop too much of an attitude, though, or they'll find themselves running Hardy, too.

[Mahyar]

Thanks Kutjara.

I'm also using Hardy and have noticed a few quirks which weren't present with Gutsy.

My Power Management isn't consistent. Sometimes it dims when on battery power and sometimes it doesn't.

With Compiz, my graphics are just slightly choppy, but not when rotating the cube.

I also noticed that the original post had an underscore, but you used a hyphen in ath-pci. Was that intentional?

Any other Hardy tips you have would be appreciated.

Regards,

Mahyar

[kutjara]

Originally Posted by Mahyar Thanks Kutjara. I'm also using Hardy and have noticed a few quirks which weren't present with Gutsy. My Power Management isn't consistent. Sometimes it dims when on battery power and sometimes it doesn't. With Compiz, my graphics are just slightly choppy, but not when rotating the cube. I also noticed that the original post had an underscore, but you used a hyphen in ath-pci. Was that intentional? Any other Hardy tips you have would be appreciated. Regards, Mahyar

The hyphen is intentional. I can't now remember why I used a hyphen instead of an underscore, but it works. I suspect I may have simply copied what I read in the other thread, but I'll have to dig around to see if I can find it again, to be sure.

Otherwise, Hardy has been very good to me (aside from a bit of unfortunateness under Alpha 5 with the glibc6 bug). I haven't had to tweak much of anything, and my graphics are pretty smooth during normal use (even with quite a lot of the compiz eyecandy turned on). I did notice quite a bit of tearing, artifacts, and other graphics nastiness when I tried to play Sauerbraten, but I haven't begun to get to the bottom of what's causing that.

One weird thing I haven't figured out yet is why Hardy won't connect to my home wireless network when the router's SSID broadcast is switched off. Gutsy would work fine once the connection had been manually set up; Hardy pretends to work (even showing the "hidden" network in the network manager applet), but it just won't connect to it. Once I turn SSID broadcast back on, it connects straightaway. Odd. On the plus side, WPA works just fine (I haven't tried WPA2 yet).