[ 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