linux on the w7j

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2007

i know this is probably not the best place for this. but since i been getting questions about linux on the w7j and people seem to find my previous thread, when they are looking for this information, im going to post some details. then i dont need to answer every question multiple times.

im not going into any distribution related stuff. if you have a question like how you do this and that in [insert your most loved/hated distribution here], go to its forum/wiki whatever.

at first, i can tell you, that everything is working except the camera. so i will start with that one.

Camera
in the windows driver for the camera i found its product name:
SONIX SN9C201
http://www.sonix.com.tw/sonix/product.do?p=SN9C201
the vendor doesn't support linux, AFAIK.
There is a project developing drivers for SONIX SN9C10x based chips. Their driver is included in the kernel. you find them here
Another project to keep your eyes on would be
linux-uvc
and
gspca

NIC
thats probably the first thing you will notice. most LiveCDs won't regognize the GBit lan chip. It is a Realtek 8168. There is no driver in the kernel, only one for the 8169 wich is not compatible (there are people working on a patch). But Realtek offers one here
Since Kernel 2.6.22 the 8169 driver in the kernel also supports the 8168 chip. Unfortunately its not documented in the kernel itself, but it works. There is no need to use the r1000 anymore.


CardReader
since kernel 2.6.17 the support has been merged. just select CONFIG_MMC_SDHCI. if you use an earlier kernel you find kernel patches here, hidden somewhere in the mailing list.

Wireless
the ipw3945 does work perfectly. at least for the few things i tried.

Bluetooth
hci_usb (BT_HCIUSB), nuff said.

usb, firewire
uhci + ehci, ohci. pretty much standard.

touchpad
synaptics. there is a driver part of xorg. no problem.

screen
it might be wrong on this one. haven't investigated it that much. it seems that the vesa bios doesn't support 1280x800. everything works with 1024x768. that only concerns the initial console (during boot or if you are not using a graphical desktop). fbset just would not work setting the native resolution. i dont know what to do about it, but it doesn't matter it all since 1024x768 still looks nice. what that means is, you dont get a framebuffer splash in 1280x800, only in 1024x768, scaled to fullscreen, so most people will not even notice.

xorg
here everthing works fine with 1280x800. i needed to get a custom modeline.
Modeline "1280x800" 83.91 1280 1312 1624 1656 800 816 824 841
or just generate one here. it works with nv and the binary nvidia.

acpi
use acpi4asus to get access to the leds on the front and the possibility to place scripts behind the hotkeys and the volumecontrol.
i tried suspend to ram and suspend to disk. i was unsuccessful with swsusp (the in kernel version).
suspend2 with the nv module works since kernel 2.6.21 pretty reliable even with the proprietary nvidia driver for suspend to disk.after about a week i have to reboot, since something seems to get corrupted, but in day to day use it has achieved almost productive stability.
i suggest to use the in kernel cpu frequency scaling together with cpufrequtils. that combination is the easiest to use, and still as powerful than any of this userspace deamons.


sound
that was a hard one. only found that one out by trial and error. the in-kernel alsa drivers works. you need the snd_hda_intel module. but, it needs certain options. there needs to be this line in your modules.conf (or whatever file is used):
options snd_hda_intel model=3stack
that was the only way for me, to get any sound.

 

you lost your W7J? =(

 

Thank you so much for this thread. I was about to install Ubuntu Dapper and wanted to check if there were any serious problems ahead.

I'll post some screenshots tomorrow. Cheers!

 

Hello,

I would be very interested to hear about your experiences with Dapper. I have tried Ubuntu and Suse and have run into a serious problem with linux on the W7j. I am experiencing "freezes" that occur randomly and last for a few seconds. I get the following error in /var/log/messages:

Jul 18 20:00:24 localhost kernel: [17180283.828000] ata2 is slow to respond, please be patient

After PM-ing the author of this thread (who has been extremely helpful) I found out that he was not experiencing this problem. So, there probably is a "work around" but I have not found the fix yet. If you have any luck getting Ubuntu to work please let us know

 

Bobby, yes. I'm having very similar issues - highly annoying freezes of the keyboard and mouse. I'm hoping to do an update and see if things get better.

Does the same problem occur if you work from the command line?

 

Ok, this is frustrating - I simply cant type out a paragraph without being disrupted by those pauses. Looks like the Sata controller is not supported.

jdkbx - which distribution of linux are you running and what is the kernel version?

 

gentoo, kernel was 2.6.16.x.

the only thing i can say, use latest vanilla and configure yourself. most distributions modify their kernel and try to make it generic, so that it boots on a lot of different computers (especially suse, dont know about ubuntu). that causes all kind of problems. dont use modules and no initrds, if you are not sure whats in there.
im pretty sure you just have some conflicting drivers or a wrong option somewhere. cant give you my config unfortunately.

 

Jdkbx - thanks. I'll give that a shot. In recovery mode, there are no issues at all so it has to be some module that is causing this problem.

 

The kernel recompilation solved the problem

Just realized that I had forgotten to compile the nvidia module in the kernel so I guess I'll have to run through the process again.. sigh.

What kind of utilities do you use to control the CPU temperature in Linux, similarly for the brightness settings of the screen (I notice the Logon screen has my last saved brightness setting, but Gnome resets to high brightness after logon) ? Thanks!

 

im not sure which module you mean, but the only nvida stuff i used was the binary only driver, to get dri in xorg. the nvidia stuff in the kernel isnt really useful. so what are you using?

the kernel does support enhanced speedstep. you can access it under
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/*
i use the cpufrequtils
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/cpufreq/cpufrequtils.html to control the governor and frequency limits.
for brightness i just use the buttons . acpi4asus makes it accessable under /proc/acpi/asus/brn.

 

One more question - how do I get the wireless card to connect to an access point? I have installed the driver and I can run the ipw3945d daemon.

Now when I run iwlist eth1 scanning, I can locate the accesspoint. However, I have no idea how to get it to actually connect. Running iwconfig eth1 shows that there is no associated accesspoint. essid is <no/any>.

What must I do it get this to work? 'ifconfig eth1 up', doesnt seem to give my laptop an IP address. I've never used wireless before on linux and any help will be much appreciated.

I'm using a Linksys WRT54GL and I am able to get this working fine under XP.

 

man iwconfig

just set the essid and the key if neccessary. thats enough to connect. use ifconfig for static ips otherwise a dhcp daemon like dhcpcd -d eth1 -t 10.

 

When I try to set essid, I get a segment fault - that surely can't be good

Gnome freezes while trying to activate that interface thanks to this. This couldnt have had much to do with the kernel . Time to mail the driver folk I guess.

 

what version of ipw3945 and wireless-tools are you using?

mine:
ipw3945-1.1.0_pre2
ipw3945-ucode-1.13
ipw3945d-1.7.22
wireless-tools-29_pre10

 

I went in for a vanilla kernel this time and it works great. Jdkbx - thank you so much

In fact, wireless works fine if you do a normal install of Dapper but the Sata problem requires a custom kernel. I had to install the ipw3945 drivers to get wireless working after that.

 

I'm looking at this computer and the W3j and I'm curious about the buttons. I know each has a number of buttons and F-functions to control various aspects of the computer. Are any of these hardware buttons? Do they require anything special to be used under linux? I'm wondering because my current laptop has a number of software buttons, but the major ones like brightness and wireless are hardware and work regardless of the installed operating system. If they are all soft buttons, that would be very disappointing because they lose some of that "it just works" appeal.

 

Brightness and wireless button both work for me. In fact even the volume knob is recognized and is extremely useful

 

Does the wireless button disable both WiFi and Bluetooth? It's good to hear that these buttons work by default! Also, the WiFi button you speak of it the Fn+F# button with the radio tower on it? Is there another "Wireless button" as well, I think was at least on the W3j.

 

there is that switch on the left upper corner. that one dis/en-ables wifi and bluetooth together. i didnt try the fn-key for wireless.

 

Ok, thanks for the info, It's good to see that most laptops still have some hardware switches and buttons!

 

Just to verify that i had the same freezing problems with suse.I even though that my HD was broken.I can guess that the support for the chipset is not very good in the kernel although i was pretty amazed that it installed the smp by itself.
Also another question.It seems that the lowest available freq on linux is 1000Mhz.Windows on battery shows 350Mhz.Any ideas how i can get that on linux?
Cheers

 

repeating myself, but the short freezing is a bad configured kernel problem.
just configure it right, and they are gone. but you already did that.
the core duo cpu is physical not able to clock lower than ~1000MHz. Windows just shows a wrong value.

 

Question,how did you figure out the 3stack module option?Did you look into the module source code?Cause couldn't find anything about those options on the web.
Good job though.Couldn't make the sound card work otherwise.

 

almost. i just searched the driver module for strings (strings snd_hda_intel.ko). i tried everything that looked like an option until i found one that worked.

 

And another question concerning the camera.Since i'm not using it under linux i'm trying to disable it the same way i did on windows.I've tried to unbind it from /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb but it still the camera is warm.Has anybody found a way to do it?
Cheers

 

just installed mandriva 2007 on my w7j and everything works great! the wireless seems to drop occasionally though, about every 30 minutes. might just be my settings

 

Did you really mean "everything" (ethernet card, nvidia card, ICH7 sound, card reader, modem, camera, etc.)?
That would be interesting...

 

no im retarded

 

It's ok for simple things like a mouse or a file transfer but did you try it with a headset?Couldn't make it work with btsco.Connects,opens a line but no sound.
Some times i think i just need windows

 

for the headset ... these things are not that related. i played around with btsco for a while last year. at first i couldn't get it to work, because of the usb bluetooth dongle i used (that was a different computer with no bluetooth integrated).
i switched to a dongle with a chipset that was definitely supported by btsco, and got it to work.
my guess would be, that the integrated bluetooth in the w7j is not compatible with btsco, just as my old bt dongle was. there is not much one can do without deep knowledge of the involved hw (bluetooth chipset) and sw (btsco, bluez, hci_usb) as long no developer involved makes it work on this particular chipset.

regarding the camera, i think you are on the wrong path. that unbinding is just to make a driver not claim the device, so another one could support it (for example there are ub and usb_storage in the kernel, which both support kind of the same devices, so you could switch between them).
what would be needed, would probably some device driver, that is able to power the camera down. but im not really sure about this actually, so dont take my word for it.

i'd love to try out all of this, but since asus support in germany seems to suck, i still don't have a working laptop and cant do anything.

 

Yeah,i think after all it's a problem of the broadcom bluetooth adaptor.Don't want to apply any of the weird patches they suggest to fix it.
As for the poweroff of the usb camera, USB_SUSPEND option could be the solution.As the documentation says:
USB selective suspend/resume and wakeup (EXPERIMENTAL) (USB_SUSPEND)
If you say Y here, you can use driver calls or the sysfs
"power/state" file to suspend or resume individual USB
peripherals.
that's why echoing 0 in state didn't do anything
I'll recompile the kernel and let you know.
By the way why did you have to send your laptop back?I thought asus laptops don't break

 

i guess/hope i had a lemon. after one week it started to freeze randomly, when i touched/moved it. i could even reproduce this freezing during post, so i know its a hw failure. that was in june.
since then i been sending it to the retailer, who is sending it to asus. they dont find anything wrong with it and send it back to the retailer, which sends it back to me. takes almost 4 weeks each time and happend 3 times so far. on the second try they changed the harddisk, because the original one didn't have a valid partition table, but was fine (i couldn't even boot the laptop, so i couldn't fix it before sending it in). that makes me think, these people do not really know what they are doing.
legally im entitled to get my money back now, since they couldn't fix it 3 times. thats what i am trying now. in the worst case i will have to sue the retailer which might take another two months ...
whatever happens, i will probably end up with a working w7 eventually, since there just are no real alternatives for me.

i still have my old asus l3500d which is almost 4 years old now and never had anything wrong with it. so sometimes they really dont break ,-)

 

im having trouble getting guild wars to work with cedega. The cedega wiki says that guild wars requires some specific imformation about your video card's agp in the xorg. How much agp memory does the geforce 7400 have? In winXP it says my graphics card has 512mb ram. can that be right???

 

I cant figure out how to use cpufregutils in ubuntu. When i install them it tells me it needs to remove powernowd and after reboot i get a message that claims my processor isnt supported.

 

the idea of the cpufrequtils is to let the kernel do the frequency management instead of a userspace daemon. you can just set the parameters with cpufreq-set. For this to work, the management code has to be in the kernel.

#
# CPU Frequency scaling
#
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_TABLE=y
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_STAT_DETAILS=y
# CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_PERFORMANCE is not set
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_DEFAULT_GOV_USERSPACE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_PERFORMANCE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_POWERSAVE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_USERSPACE=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND=y
CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_CONSERVATIVE=y

#
# CPUFreq processor drivers
#
# CONFIG_X86_ACPI_CPUFREQ is not set
# CONFIG_X86_POWERNOW_K6 is not set
# CONFIG_X86_POWERNOW_K7 is not set
# CONFIG_X86_POWERNOW_K8 is not set
# CONFIG_X86_GX_SUSPMOD is not set
CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_CENTRINO=y
CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_CENTRINO_ACPI=y
# CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_CENTRINO_TABLE is not set
# CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_ICH is not set
# CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_SMI is not set
# CONFIG_X86_P4_CLOCKMOD is not set
# CONFIG_X86_CPUFREQ_NFORCE2 is not set
# CONFIG_X86_LONGRUN is not set

#
# shared options
#
# CONFIG_X86_ACPI_CPUFREQ_PROC_INTF is not set
# CONFIG_X86_SPEEDSTEP_LIB is not set

that should do.

you then need to set the parameters after boot:

cpufreq-set -g ondemand -u 1830000 -c 0; cpufreq-set -g ondemand -u 1830000 -c 1

or

cpufreq-set -g powersave -u 996000 -c 0; cpufreq-set -g powersave -u 996000 -c 1

for a start

 

i have no idea what you just said. How do i do all that? can i get a list of terminal commands, pretty please..

 

i guess you already found "cpufreq-info", did you? type it and watch the output. if it says something like (not exactly that, since this is another cpu):

# cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 002: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2006
Report errors and bugs to [email protected], please.
analyzing CPU 0:
driver: p4-clockmod
CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0 1
hardware limits: 2.00 GHz - 3.20 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 3.20 GHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, powersave, userspace, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 2.00 GHz and 3.20 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 2.00 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
analyzing CPU 1:
driver: p4-clockmod
CPUs which need to switch frequency at the same time: 0 1
hardware limits: 2.00 GHz - 3.20 GHz
available frequency steps: 2.00 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.80 GHz, 3.20 GHz
available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, powersave, userspace, performance
current policy: frequency should be within 2.00 GHz and 3.20 GHz.
The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
within this range.
current CPU frequency is 2.00 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).

then you all set. if not, your kernel is not configured correctly. then you have to do this. the stuff i posted before is part of the .config file in the kernel directory which is related to the cpufreq functionality. google for an tutorial on compiling your own kernel and set the options like the posted stuff. when you boot that new kernel, cpufreq-info should display stuff like above.

from there you can influence the frequencies with "cpufreq-set".

cant make it any easier for you. you will have to find out the rest by yourself.

 

i really dont want to have to learn how to compile a kernel.. What are the big advantages to using cpufreq instead of powernowd? How much of a difference will i see in battery life?

 

i could give you a list of reasons ... but i think none would matter to you. if you have your daemon running, like you want it, then you are fine.
if you configure the daemon and the cpufreq stuff the same way, you get the same battery life, basically.

 

Have you tried installing the drivers from realtek's website? I added the 3stack line which you mentioned in the initial post, but its very annoying that i cannot control the Front sound volume. Games tend to use this line, and it is only recognized as a switch. I was hoping the drivers from realtek might address this. When i tried to install them with the automatic script ./install it would stop after an error because it couldnt find some libasound files. Then my computer would become unstable and not allow me to open directories or do anything. After reboot i would get errors and could not log in to my account even in safe mode!

 

Anybody who got the card reader working?
thanks!

 

not to repeat myself ...
http://mmc.drzeus.cx/wiki/Linux/Drivers/sdhci

 

I had already seen your first post, i do have a 2.6.17 kernel, but i can't get my card reader working....
I loaded the mmc_core and sdhci kernel modules, but when i insert a mmc or sd card nothing happens.... no output in dmesg too...
Which modules do you load? Any particular option?

Thank you very much...!

 

cant remember whether there was dmesg output.

try mounting the card

put this line into your /etc/fstab

/dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/card vfat rw,user,noauto,umask=000 0 0

make the directory /mnt/card

and then try

mount /mnt/card

don't forget to unmount the card, before you pop it out.

if that fails ... you know how to compile a kernel? (that seems to be the answer to almost any problem with hw).

 

nice posstttt

 

Does anybody know how to set the sound toggle thing on the side of the laptop?

It works perfectly for me....kind of..
it works in that it changes the volume of my....line in.... not quite what i want.

Where is the config file (or the deamon) that controls that switch?
thanks

 

if you use the deamon from acpi4asus (asus_acpid) you should have files in ~/.asus_acpi/events/ like vol_down and vol_up. i use aumix to change the volume.

vol_up:
event=hotkey.*30[[:space:]].*
action=/usr/bin/aumix -v +5

vol_down:
event=hotkey.*31[[:space:]].*
action=/usr/bin/aumix -v -5

you might have to experiment with aumix -h if it still changes you line-in.

 

I use ubuntu and simply had to choose "PCM" in
System -> Preferences -> (Audio? Sound? don't know the english menu)

then launched alsamixer and adjusted "Line" on half-bar (green)


Ps. Webcam and Card Reader still dead

 

Hi I've had debian 4.0 (kernel 2.6.22.1) running fine on my W7J for several months.

But i've been having issues with the CDROM freezing the hole machine when it spins down. Apparently a firmware update of the drive fixes the problem. So I first move the BIOS from 302 to 304 (latest). And now cpufreq doesn't work. My CDROM drive doesn't lock up the machine any more, but i'm now getting allot of (in my syslog):

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata1.00: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
res 40/00:02:00:08:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd0)
ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
ata1: soft resetting port
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
ata1: EH complete

I also never managed to get suspend to ram/disk working & I'm hoping the new BIOS my fix this (I havent tested as yet).

A quick check under /sys/devices/system/cpu reveals only cpu1 having a cpufreq directory, what happened to cpu0??

I also see (in dmesg)

Setting up standard PCI resources
APIC error on CPU1: 00(40)
ACPI: Interpreter enabled
ACPI: (supports S0 S1 S3 S4 S5)
ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing
ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (0000:00)
...
EXT3 FS on sda7, internal journal
loop: module loaded
ACPI Exception (exoparg2-0442): AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT, Index (0FFFFFFFC) is beyond end of object [20070126]
ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_PR_.CPU1._PSS] (Node c18e59dc), AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT
ACPI Exception (processor_perflib-0234): AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT, Evaluating _PSS [20070126]

a quick look on google reveals

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg340209.html

but no fix..


My question is, does anyone have issues with the CDROM drive and the BIOS update from Asus?

cheers

Jims

 

Hey,

I am currently running 2.6.22 with suspend2 patches. I dont see any of the problems you describe. I rarely use the cdrom, but when i tested it right now it worked perfectly. My bios version is 302 and i have no reason to upgrade.
since i had an asus laptop before this one, i have seen that asus developers dont care about correct acpi implementations in the bios as long as it does work in windows. suspend2 will still get you a working suspend to disk implementation.
since cpufreq and the cdrom work flawlessly for me, i guess some options in you kernel are not right, but thats just a guess ...

so the bios update broke cpufreq? it worked before? seems like i a good reason not to upgrade.