Acer AS4820TG and Linux!

How is that laptop with Linux? I'm considering it.
Also, any news on optimus support yet?

Also the Lenovo y460 working good?

Any similar laptops working good? Lol!

 

How about posting specs, eh? I looked it up but couldn't find what wireless card it had.

Everything else looks fine. Optimus isn't supported but this has an ATI card, unless I'm looking at the wrong spec.

 

Yep....post the wireless chipset it uses....that and video are the two biggies

 

Acer doesn't have much info available on their website and im being held up on the home page .

I think it was an intel wireless chipset, probably supported just fine. Card is ati 6550.
What worried me was how the switchable graphics would work (if at all).

Damn nvidia really lost a bunch of linux users by deciding not to support linux..
They really lost a big market!

I can literally say that out of the grand or so I spend on a laptop, none of it will go to nvidia and the reason is optimus.

 

I own one. It's the slightly older model with the ATI 5650 and an i5 460M CPU. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and getting it running was super simple. After installing Ubuntu do NOT install the proprietary drives from ATI or your laptop will fail to bring up a gui interface on reboot.

There's a thread on the ubunu forums on how to switch off the ATI GPU and switch on the Intel GPU which is exactly what I needed when running linux. It works really well. Suspend seems to work fine, I never use hibernate. There is, in fact, only one problem I have with it. If you're running a video in full screen mode in either VLC or mplayer, and the machine is set to just blank the screen when you close the lid, it will hang the graphics card when you reopen it and you'll be forced to power cycle the machine to get it back up and running.

 

Cool thanks Sxooter.
You're very helpful on the Acer forums .

So you installed the AMD drivers then?
Are you on the latest iteration?

 

I am using the open source drives for the laptop. With ATI turned off in linux, so I'm only using the intel IGP when running ubuntu. If you want to use the proprietary drives with linux, you have to switch the machine to discrete graphics only or it won't bring up the GUI. Since I don't do any gaming or 3D work in linux, my 4820TG is really just a 4820T under ubuntu...

 

I see. I ask because I usually use KDE and/or compiz. Which may be a bit for the IGP to handle.

How do you switch to only discrete?
Is there a CCC gui that allows this control?

 

Switching to discrete only you can do by setting the BIOS to discrete only and then install the proprietary drivers from the System -> Admin -> Additional Drivers app. I'm sure there's a software way to do it, but the only one I know is in the other direction that turns off the ATI and turns on the IGP only. Battery life in Ubuntu went from 2 hours to 4.5 hours. There was a thread in the ubuntu forums on how to do it and I just copied and pasted from the Ubuntu forum.

 

A few things. One, here's the link on how to disable the GPU under linux when booting:

power down ATI on boot

OK, the other day, after an update (not a kernel update) in ubuntu 10.10, I got a kernel panic on rebooting, same as the chap on the second page of that thread. Like him I booted an older kernel, commented out the line:

#blacklist radeon

and rebooted to the latest kernel. Then I ran the make again to make the timelinex_acpi.ko file and copied it back into the kernel modules directory and rebooted and the ATI was again powered down and I am getting 4.5 or so hours of battery.