[kajla76]

Hello Linux Users,

I would like to share the experience how I got all* of my new Acer Aspire 5520-5290 working with Linux (01/17/2008).

[* I have not tested the infra red port and the card reader]

This laptop has the following main components:

• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-55
• 1 GB RAM shared with video card
• Hitachi HTS541680J9SA00 80 GB HDD
• nVidia Corporation GeForce 7000M 10de:0533 (rev a2)
• nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio 10de:055c (rev a1)
• nVidia Corporation MCP67 Ethernet 10de:054c (rev a2)
• Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express Adapter 168c:001c (rev 01)
• Alps(! i.e. not Synaptics) touchpad
• Acer Crystal Eye webcam 5986:0102

My distro is Debian Testing (lenny), but I think the solutions here may be equally useful for anybody having trouble with the machine.

My way of using the machine is to boot it off a 4G USB key, so I have not tried installing Linux on it.
Though this laptop has amd64 processors, I use a 32 bit kernel on it:
2.6.22-3-k7 - the current Debian testing kernel.

Here is the list of issues that I had to solve, and the solutions I found.


ISSUE #1 - 'Unable to set System Clock'

I got this message during boot and then shutdown of the system. Besides 'hwclock' does not work, it reports:

'select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out'

(Using the 64 bit kernel 2.6.22-3-amd64 I did not have this problem, though, this is the reason for the 'if [ "x`uname -m`" == "xi686" ];' condition below.)

Indeed, the hardware clock is not set/the system time is not acquired correctly. The solution to this is to add the --directisa flag to hwconfig.

If you use debian, add these lines to /etc/default/rcS to help the boot/shutdown process:

# Required on certain laptops:
if [ "x`uname -m`" == "xi686" ]; then
        HWCLOCKPARS="$HWCLOCKPARS --directisa";
fi

ISSUE #2 - X server
Features: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7000M 10de:0533 (rev a2)

I use xserver-xorg 7.2-5, the current package on debian testing.

If I configure the X server (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg), the 'nv' driver is correctly chosen, the laptop indeed has nVidia Corporation GeForce 7000M. However, starting X fails with:

...
(EE) No devices detected.
...

The nv driver does not seem to recognize the card. It is possible to start X with the vesa driver, though, and get a preliminary GUI up.

The NVidia display driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.07-pkg1.run provides the ultimate solution. Download, and install the driver (have the necessary packages for building the kernel module). For me it complains that my kernel was built with GCC 4.1 and I should use the CC option/environment variable, but this is a false warning. This kernel is build with GCC 4.2, so this warning can be ignored (choosing not to abort) and the compilation and installation finishes successfully.

After this, the NVidia tools (nvidia-xconfig) can be used to create an xorg.conf. For me, COMPOSITE and GLX are enabled and I get transparent windows together with direct rendering.


ISSUE #3 - Sound
Features: nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio 10de:055c (rev a1)

This laptop has nVidia Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio. It does not work with the ALSA drivers currently in the debian testing kernel. I downloaded the latest ALSA kernel module sources (alsa-driver-hg20080116.tar.bz2) and compiled the snd_hda_intel driver.
I replaced the stock modules with the new ones, and the sound card works properly.
Note: you have to make sure the old modules are properly unloaded before you can expect the new modules to function well! You may need to reboot your computer (if you don't want to remove the old modules from the kernel manually) after you replaced the module files.


ISSUE #4 - Wifi
Features: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express Adapter 168c:001c (rev 01)

The not-entirely-open-source madwifi drivers did not work for me. ndiswrapper, however, did the trick. I downloaded the latest WinXP Atheros driver from the Acer site http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/dat...XB62(WHQL).zip
, installed the 32-bit driver to ndiswrapper, and after removing remnants of previous failed attempts with the madwifi driver from the kernel, I got the wifi working without a hitch. I use wpa_supplicant for WPA.


ISSUE #5 - Alps Touchpad
Features: Alps touchpad

The touchpad is not detected correctly by the current Debian testing kernel 2.6.22-3 (psmouse module), dmesg reports:

input: ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse

I took the latest snapshot of the stable Linux kernel tree: 2.6.24-rc8-git2 http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kern...4-rc8-git2.bz2.
I had to apply this patch on the patch baseline and compile the psmouse module of the 2.6.24 kernel for the 2.6.22 testing kernel I use. Here is how I did it:

cd linux-2.6.24-rc8/drivers/input/mouse
sed -e '{s/\bBIT_WORD\b/LONG/g; s/\bBIT_MASK\b/BIT/g; }' --in-place *
Then patch alps.c with the attachment (alps.c.txt): it reverses the up and down buttons on the touchpad to get the right scrolling direction in X.
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` modules_install
mv /lib/modules/2.6.22-3-k7/kernel/drivers/input/mouse /root/ignored_modules/2.6.22-3-k7/
depmod
rmmod psmouse
modprobe psmouse

You have to edit the source a bit (the sed line), because two macros changed names between these versions.
This psmouse module recognizes the touchpad as:

input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint

After this, X can be configured with the Synaptics(!) touchpad, and it seems to work as expected.


ISSUE #6 - WebCam
Features: Acer Crystal Eye webcam 5986:0102

The webcam works perfectly with the uvcvideo module, Debian testing/linux-uvc-souce package .


ADDENDUM

I got this laptop with Win Vista on it, and it was so slow I got the impression I was using some old junk hardware. Disabling decorations - especially transparency - helped, but made Vista look bad.
I had another Acer laptop with exactly the same size of HDD (80GB) and XP on it. It is possible to copy (dd) the whole disk to the new 5520 laptop. After the transfer it would start, and then only the drivers need to be downloaded from acer and installed. In the end it is possible to preserve the XP system completely, and get it working on the new 5520 laptop (I don't know how Windows Update (WU) would react to this, though - probably the machine would fail the 'genuine test', so disable WU on the 5520 machine). If you did this, you would see that XP performs much better than on the old hardware, and runs much smoother than Vista. But this is only for experimentation, I do not use Windows at all. I have a Debian Testing on a 4GB USB stick and I can boot virtually any machine to it, as I please. Linux can return the power to computer users that Windows has taken away from them.

Hoping that this guide will encourage others to use linux on their laptops (especially if it is an Acer 5520),

Laszlo

P.S.
The laptop costed ~540$, and it seems very well worth its value. However, the 'weak' hardware makes it almost worthless with Vista.

[kajla76]

Make sure you use the V4L2 (2!) plugin (libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2) with Ekiga - the V4L driver fails to open the device.

Questions are welcome!

[sliding]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your detailed info!!

I have a n Aspire7520 T53 since august '07. With 2Gb mem and 120G harddisk of
which 20GB is invisible/used for restoring the machine.
Allthough Vista runs pretty well, but slower than my XP machine with 1Gb and a earlier AMD64 processor.
Well Vista is not the thing for me, so I decided to add a 2nd hard drive to install Linux, openSuse10.3.
Sound was pretty easy to get it working.
However, I think the "subwoover" is not working.

Q. Does your Aspire have a subwoover and does it work? If so, how?

With your instructions at hand I am gonna try to get the Webcam going.

Thanks again,

Ellio

[kajla76]

Hello Sliding,

I don't think my 5520 has a subwoofer. You have to check what your webcam is (lsusb -v and look for the ID after the Bus and Device numbers). Then google it - find the right driver. If you have ID 5986:0102 Acer Crystal Eye webcam, then it should work perfectly just like mine with the UVC driver (see Linux UVC driver and tools).

[sliding]

Hi kajla76,

I installed Ekiga with all the needed libs, it runs and with configuration it
detects the Acer Cristal Eye, but when running test it messages that the
driver does not support the video color formats that Ekiga tried to use.
I have uvcvideo-kmp-default r117_2.6.22.5_31-2 for the
kernel driver.
Any idea how to go on?

Regards,

Ellio

[kajla76]

Hello again,

the webcam works for me with the following packages:

linux-uvc-source 0.1.0.svn120-2
ekiga 2.0.11-2
libpt-1.10.10 1.10.10-1
libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2 1.10.10-1

The trick is to use the V4L2 video plugin in ekiga (not V4L).

I think these are the important packages. If you do not use debian and you can't find these packages for your distro, it should still be possible for you to download the debian source packages and compile them, or you can look for these packages/sources on ekiga's site or on the linux UVC drivers page. I compiled the svn version yesterday, and that also worked well for me.

I can't imagine what causes ekiga to fail with the webcam for you - my best idea is to recommend you to try it with the versions that work for me.

[kajla76]

It soon may not be necessary to apply the patch to the latest kernel to get the touchpad up/down buttons work correctly since my mail to Dmitry Torokhov and Vojtech Pavlik - developers of the psmouse kernel module - received a positive response. They considered including the small patch in their module.

[sliding]

Hello kajla76,

After applying some updates for my openSuse10.3, when trying to use Kopete, it activated the Cristal eye webcam and showed me in the camera.
Before the updates it did not work. So there is some progress.
Kopete does not keep the color adjustments after setting the and restarting the programm.
Now I try to get Skype working. Did not work, but after updating libasound and refreshing the 32 bit version at the same time, Skype starts using a startup script
Skype Video unter Opensuse 10.3 64-Bit startscript - Skype Forums with some modification.
Skype does not see the cam and also the sound does not work yet.

The touchpad does work, allthough I did not try to configure it yet
I rather use the mouse if possible.

[kajla76]

I have just downloaded the skype 2.0.0.27 dynamic binaries. I made a test call and the sound recording/playback works. If I open Options->Video Devices->Test, I can see myself perfectly in the test window. I used no startup script whatsoever. Keep updating those packages!

[sliding]

The video does work now wirh the newest beta Skype.
No sound however. This is strange because it sees the HDA NVidia.
The aspire 5520 has the same nVidia HDA as my 7520. as far I can see.
Did you install the most recentAlsa drivers to replace the default hda drivers
from the kernel?
My kernel is: 2.6.22.13-0.3-default #1 SMP 2007/11/19 15:02:58 UTC x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Thanks so far,

Regards,

Ellio