I have an Acer Aspire 7720-6152. I was running 7.10 and now I'm running 8.04 with the rt kernel upgraded from March's beta version. Keep in mind that my 7.10 was normal Ubuntu with the generic kernel, and my 8.04 was Ubuntu Studio with the rt kernel. Here is the experience I've had so far:
- On Ubuntu 7.10 my Realtek audio wasn't working right off. I had to manually install the latest alsa drivers. 8.04 works with the sound right off, although once in a while amarok gives an error that the sound has to be restarted and sometimes sound stops working, but not very often.
- On both Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, my built in webcam worked without any problems after installing cheeze.
- If I remember correctly, 7.10's wireless internet didn't work right off, but 8.04 did.
- The keyboard extra keys worked for me with 7.10 and the generic kernel with the exception of the Euro key and the Dollar Sign key above the left and right arrow keys. 8.04 and the rt kernel, extra keys that didn't work were: the e, the mail button, internet and bluetooth key, and the internet key, some stick figure of a guy key, the Euro key and dollar sign key. Function and Media keys such as volume, mute, and changing brightness seem to work, but I don't use the next/previous play/pause and stop keys, but they seem to work. I'm not sure if this is an rt-kernel problem since it used to work.
- The Nvidia drivers didn't seem to like compiz-fusion at first (or vica-versa), and animations are choppy, especially after running for a while (memory leak? I don't see any though...). Loading a page in epiphany while rotating the cube slows the rotation down more than on my older, much weaker laptop. I don't think the 8600M GT is very well supported yet for compiz, but games seem to run well and an update to compiz recently seems to have at least helped. I've tried the 169 Nvidia driver (default), the 171, and the 173, and so far I think I prefer the 171 because it is newer than 169 but 173 doesn't let you change the resolution for games to anything but my highest resolution. You have to install without the repository for the later two. The installer nvidia makes works well if you uninstall the restricted modules and install the kernel headers.
- I never did get the subwoofer working.
- The fan seems to be working fine, but I don't know if our laptops are identical. The fan seems to blow when it should.
- Epiphany, my prefered web browser, seems to crawl compared to firefox. Expecially hovering over links with javascript and changing tabs.
- Nautilus frequently freaks out when I drag files over the pane on the left side. It thinks I want to drop files before I let go of the key. This might just be a 8.04 beta issue though.
- Flash nonfree plugin doesn't work very well. It will play a youtube video for about 1 minute, and then the cpu will drop to near 0% and the browser will freeze. This seems to happen in both Firefox and Epiphany, and even Konqueror doesn't seem to like flash much.
So in summary, sound and wireless should work for you, but unfortunately the keys or special buttons at top of the keyboard don't. Also the compiz-fusion, flash and epiphany bugs are bothersome, though compiz does seem to be working better now. With those two exceptions, things seem to be working well.
One last thought, if you don't like variable cpu speeds (like if you are plugged in all of the time) you could try setting the speed to performance on startup
Check your speed this way:
This is how I changed it to the fastest setting, where -c # is the number
of the processor.
Code:
sudo cpufreq-selector -c 0 -g performance
sudo cpufreq-selector -c 1 -g performance
Let me know if anyone figures out the fixes to any of these problems I've had. I hope this helps and I hope someone can help me too. I can't wait until most of the bugs are worked out for this hardware, because it will be a very nice machine, although it is already pretty good.
Steve
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