Acer Timeline 3810T

[fictivetoast]

About the touchpad button: It does switch the tp off, but not on, could this be worked around by a script or making a module persistent or something like that? Has anyone installed the acerhk package from repo's, and with what result?

Have you tried

sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

as suggested here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireTimeline/Fixes ?

[trendzetter]

what does running this give you?

xrandr --prop

You should get an output similar to this:

$ xrandr --prop
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 1366 x 1366
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 310mm x 174mm
	EDID_DATA:
		00ffffffffffff0030e4010200000000
		00130103801f11780a8845955a568d28
		23505400000001010101010101010101
		010101010101561d56c6500020303020
		350036ae100000190000000000000000
		00000000000000000000000000fe004c
		4720446973706c61790a2020000000fc
		004c503134305748322d544c41310039
	PANEL_FITTING: full
		supported: center       full_aspect  full        
	BACKLIGHT_CONTROL: native
		supported: native       legacy       combination  kernel      
	BACKLIGHT: 2078 (0x0000081e) range:  (0,2078)
   1366x768       60.0*+
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
	BOTTOM: 37 (0x00000025) range:  (0,100)
	RIGHT: 46 (0x0000002e) range:  (0,100)
	TOP: 36 (0x00000024) range:  (0,100)
	LEFT: 54 (0x00000036) range:  (0,100)
	TV_FORMAT: NTSC-M
		supported: NTSC-M       NTSC-443     NTSC-J       PAL-M       
		           PAL-N        PAL

The line in bold is support backlight controls.

$ xrandr --prop
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 345mm x 194mm
	EDID_DATA:
		00ffffffffffff0030e4020200000000
		00130103802313780a28659759548e27
		1e505400000001010101010101010101
		010101010101561d56c6500020303020
		350059c2100000190000000000000000
		00000000000000000000000000fe004c
		4720446973706c61790a2020000000fc
		004c503135365748332d544c41310039
	scaling mode:	Fullscreen
		supported: Non-GPU      Fullscreen   No scale     Aspect      
   1366x768       60.0*+
   1360x768       59.8  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
DVI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Seems that I have no backlight control in xrandr. I've been googling but I didn't find a working solution.

[quail-linux]

.....
Has anyone installed the acerhk package from repo's, and with what result?

There is no need for acerhk as far as I understand is that acer_wmi is the successor of acerhk

[Ashrael]

@fictivetoast:

Have you tried
Code:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

as suggested here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireTimeline/Fixes ?

Yes, I knew that one. But, I was thinking about linking this key to a script or something. I can get the keycode with xev, so It must be possible to link this key to a script that re-enables the touchpad.

XEV output: KeyPress event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x4000001,
root 0x7a, subw 0x0, time 671387, (-417,392), root257,443),
state 0x0, keycode 200 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

@quail-linux: thanks! I was just wondering about that acerhk package.
@quail-linux: I have installed 8.10 yesterday and with the kernel on the livecd (2.6.27-7-generic) and this gives the following output:

$ dmesg | tail
[ 233.511223] UDF-fs: No VRS found
[ 233.595665] ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
[ 233.702364] ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A
[ 268.412516] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 0
[ 268.412528] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 0
[ 268.412536] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 1
[ 268.412540] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 2
[ 268.412543] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 3
[ 268.421637] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 0
[ 268.421655] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 0

BUT, it does work with this kernel. Then I updated all packages, and this gives the following result (2.6.27-14-generic):


[ 166.752315] ata5.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 166.752325] ata5: hard resetting link
[ 168.584065] ata5: failed to reset engine (errno=-5)
[ 176.784266] ata5: softreset failed (device not ready)
[ 176.784306] ata5: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[ 176.784323] ata5.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x40)
[ 176.784328] ata5.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)

So this is the same result I get with jaunty as mentioned in my previous posts.

If things are like that for much longer, I will have to revert to windows again (HELP!) I bought this laptop to be used with ubuntu....

TIA!

[Dan48p]

Hello, I have been looking around these forums briefly for a little while now and have a question about my acer. I bought a 3810tz and installed an amd64 version of ubuntu 9.04 and was able to boot directly into ubuntu without changing from AHCI to IDE mode.

About a day after I had been using this setup part of the screen went dark and I got a replacement in the mail from amazon. I followed the exact same procedure that I had before (shrinking the vista partition to about 140gb and installing ubuntu on the rest) but this time I had to switch into IDE mode.

Looking through the bios the only noticeable difference I could find was that the new laptop has "Hitachi" in the hard drive 0 space, followed by a series of numbers, and the old laptop just has a series of numbers in the same place.

I saw that other people were switching to IDE mode and thought I would try it out, though I'm fairly dissapointed that I have must switch modes in order to boot a particular OS.

I posted for a couple reasons, one, maybe narrow down why some of these laptops have to be in IDE mode and others don't. Also, is there any way to get the my new machine to function like my other one does? I will still have both of these laptops for a few days until I send the old one back, so if there are any settings I should look at on the two or anything please let me know.

Thanks,
dan

[lemurian]

Hello, I have been looking around these forums briefly for a little while now and have a question about my acer. I bought a 3810tz and installed an amd64 version of ubuntu 9.04 and was able to boot directly into ubuntu without changing from AHCI to IDE mode.

Same here on my 3810T. No need to switch from AHCI to IDE mode. There are other pieces of advice I saw in this thread which did not apply to my machine.

In other news:

The backlight problem does not occur for me on kernel 2.6.31-6. This is a karmic kernel which I installed from the PPA mentioned in this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1246398

Don't upgrade to this kernel unless you know Ubuntu pretty well. After the upgrade my machine would not boot and I had to boot in rescue mode and edit some files to get it to boot. Also, 2.6.31-9 from that PPA hangs after mounting the encrypted fs. I don't know why and have not investigated.

[trendzetter]

- I found a way to set the brightness using this suggestion:

the only solution to increase or decrease the brightness (in fact i need to decrease it, because it is at 100% all the time) was with these commands:

first : find the device address (here 00:02.0)
lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

second :
setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=66 (a value between 00 and FF, where FF is 100%)

Not very userfriendly but working for now.

[Dan48p]

I suppose my last post should have been a little more clear. The backlight problem that my machine had was that the bottom right hand corner of the screen would flicker and go out completely. This happened in Ubuntu, Windows and even in the bios. I have not noticed any problems with my brightness so far with this computer though I have really only used windows long enough to shrink it's partition so I don't really have much to compare it with.

I wonder if Amazon would notice if I swapped out the hard drives on these computers before I send the bad one back... It would be nice to have the option of booting windows without first changing my bios settings.

[jacktow]

For those with dedicated ATI graphics card models (eg 8371G), check out this post:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...76#post7933876

This should help you save some power

[Ashrael]

@quail-linux:

well, I've decided to take this one (acer timeline 4810TG) back to the store. Since there seem to be only two people in the world with the same problem I had, I assume it must be the sata connection that is dodgy.
Will come back when I have had some hands-on time with the new one...

Thanks!