Drivers on ubuntu

Just installed Ubuntu on my acer 3820TG (came with win 7 installed), but since I never ran ubuntu before (actually, I have never had two OS installed before) I dont know what to do with all drivers. Since my mousepad is acting all weird, I guess I have to install all drivers from scratch. Is that right? Problem is, on the acer site they only seem to have drivers for windows. What to do?

My biggest concern is getting the integrated graphics to work (or to switch to it if it already does work) since now I am down to two hours of battery after a full charge.

 

Drivers in Linux are mostly in the kernel, some are add-on modules, like proprietary wifi drivers and the proprietary graphics drivers from nvidia and ati, both of which should be available in your hardware drivers application. Almost everything except for these proprietary drivers should be already active out of the box.

What is wrong with your touchpad? What brand is it?

 

I tried installing the proprietary drivers for my high performance (compared to the dedicated intel card) ATI card, but after a restarting the computer I only came as far as the Ubuntu logo showing for a couple of seconds and then - black screen. Had to switch to dedicated graphics in BIOS to be able to start ubuntu and uninstalling the ATI drivers.

When running dedicated graphics I noticed that the battery life still was under 2 hours, which is much less than what I get in win 7 (about 5 hours). Somehow it seems that both graphic cards are running. Any clue on how to completely disable the ATI card and running only the dedicated intel card?

The touchpad shows as alps pointing device in windows system manager. When running ubuntu, it is much less sensitive, the two finger scroll doesnt work, and when scrolling with the scroll bar it only goes to the top or bottom of the page/document (I cannot scroll just a few rows).

Ubuntu also says that I dont have any bluetooth device, which I have.

Both the drivers for the touchpad and for the bluetooth are available at acer.com, but only for windows. Would does drivers work on ubuntu?

 

I know this isn't exactly what you're asking for, but have you considered running Ubuntu on a virtual machine like VirtualBox? That's what I do, using Windows 7 as the host. The resources needed by Ubuntu isn't significant, so it doesn't tax the system that much having two OSes running simultaneously. Unless you must have dedicated graphics running on Ubuntu for some purpose, using VM would be easier I think.

 

Ah ok, worth a thought. The main reason i run linux is to get the terminal (and VIM) when i program python. Aptitude seems sweet too . Besides that I dont think I will need anything specific from linux at this point. However, I would like to get to know linux better. Are there any disadvantages running ubuntu through virtualbox compared to having it installed as a separate OS?

 

not really...the only ones i can think of would be memory/resource usage..(i'd recommend having at least 1 gb..with anything though the more memory the better).....and you have to wait 2 boot times ((the time it takes to boot Windows, and then the time it takes to boot Ubuntu within Windows). but i dont think both of those are really going to make a big enough difference in whether or not you want to use a VM.

 

You can use the emacs editor to code. Its available in both windows and linux
emacs screenshots:
http://www.picogui.org/Screenshots/20030325_emacs.png
sysphere gallery :: screenshots :: emacs
http://www.washington.edu/lst/help/computing_fundamentals/unix/img/emacs-c.gif

Heck, vim is also available for windows:
download : vim online

Regardign disadvantages of virtualbox; Ubuntu might run a bit slower, and the host dystem (windows) will have to give up some of its ram to run virtualbox; but if you have a modern computer with 4gb ram, this should not cause problems.

 

Thought I would see more linux patriotism here, but I am glad that everyone wants to find the most simple solution, even if it includes windows

That dual boot time might be a bit annoying. I guess I can live with it, but it does seem alot easier to have a "clean" install of ubuntu. If there is a way to solve the graphics problem I think I will go for the latter.

I tried VIM for windows but all I got was gVIM (which at first glance seemed crap) since there is no terminal in windows. But maybe it works with emacs editor? If thats the case, I might not need linux at all. However, I always thought that linux was a better OS as long as you took the time to learn it. But if windows can do the same things as linux then there are no reason for me to switch as I am quite familiar with windows by now.

 

I would dual boot....I do it for gaming mainly....If I was going to use Linux full time for work con VM, I would use RHEL 6 and pay the 49 bux a year...well, maybe CentOS or Scientific Linux. I find linux more stable than windows, and easier to recover data in the event of a 'mishap'. It's worth learning, do it

 

Which brings us back to the original question. How do I get my touchpad, bluetooth and switchable graphics to work on ubuntu? =) All I can find are windows drivers. The proprietary drivers for the ATI card did not work, and even if they did I dont think it would solve the problem with the ATI card eating all the battery power.

 

Sorry....the first shakedown I do for a laptop when I buy it is linux compatibility....I use nvidia....I think with linux you'll be stuck using one or the other re your switchable graphics...I know there are some ATI users on here that can give you some insight....hang on a bit...

bluetooth will definitely work....I refuse to use a touchpad but don't see a problem with that..

have you installed? or using a liveDVD?

 

Yeah, its gvim for windows, running gvim in its own window = running vim in a terminal. Actually gvim is better since you can also use the mouse to position the cursor anywhere in text. Linux also has gvim.

Emacs is actually a very powerful extensible editor
Emacs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yeah, I prefer linux. But that does not mean windows is worthless, or that one should not use gvim/emacs in windows. Use both since you already know windows, you can use gvim to work in windows, and have a stress free enviroment to tinker around linux

 

Is it a switchable ATI card then? Check out vga_switcheroo to switch between cards. Using fglrx-control you should be able to clock down the card to save energy. For your touchpad problem, try installing gsynaptics to configure the touchpad.

 

Actually windows does have a terminal, it's called cmd.exe

As for your switchable graphics, just in the first place do you need the dedicated card for what you're going to do? It's not a fix for the problem, but could avoid unneeded work if you don't use it.

 

First of all, thanks alot to you all for helping me out!

I installed ubuntu desktop edition via windows installer (only way to install it without DVD or usb). So now I have a dual boot with ubuntu sitting on its own partition.

I agree with what you say, but the problem with gVIM is that it runs locally. I need to connect to other machines and run VIM on them, and as far as I understand I need a terminal for that. Same problem with running virtualizations.

I found some more info about switcheroo, but I am still a complete beginner on linux so it seemed a bit too difficult to me. Maybe it isnt?

I'll try gsynaptics, thanks.

Hehe, I think we can agree on the disadvantages on codeing in cmd

Top priority is to get better battery life, so turning the ATI card off completely would suffice. However, if I decide to switch to linux completely it would be nice if I could run some games and therefor turn the ATI card on again, but at the moment I'll use windows for that.

 

^^ So you are not after vim on your local machine, you want to just connect to a remote machine and run vim on the remote machine?

You can just use an ssh terminal for this. Eg PuTTY
PuTTY Download Page

 

DexterM, seems I am stuck with windows then =D. Anyhow, I still want to learn linux so I'll try to get it working properly on this machine.

I installed gsynaptics using "sudo aptitude install gsynaptics" but when I try to run it it says I have to add "SHMConfig" "true" to xorg.conf. I dont know what xorg.conf does, but as far as I understand it doesnt exist on this machine. I used "sudo gedit /etc/x11/xorg.conf" but all i got was a blank window. When I added "SHMConfig" "true" and tried to save it stated that there isnt any xorg.conf file to save to. What did I do wrong?

 

I used to dual boot my machines, until I got tired of waiting for Linux drivers. The problem will always be there for new machines, Linux developers are always a step behind.

Xorg.conf is the configuration file for the X server. Anyway, I had the impression we're not supposed to mess around with xorg.conf directly nowadays (some other file is designated as user-changeable, the X server pulls different files to create its xorg.conf), which implies that the gsynaptics software (or at least the documentation) is out of date. In any case, perhaps this website is of some help: “You have to set ?SHMConfig? ?true?…” – even though you have created shmconfig.fdi | kogan agora netbook

The nice thing about Ubuntu is that it seems to be a large user base, so any problems encountered would probably have been solved by others.

 

Its /etc/X11/.... (capital X)

Running linux in a virtualbox would also be a very good way to learn/use linux

 

capital X gives the same result =/

 

You dont have a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file?

 

TAB is a very important key on the keyboard.
Some distros however do not use a xorg.conf file.

 

you could check in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d...but i don't think xorg comes by default anymore with ubuntu
he could however create one: if he wants..(if he knows what he's doing and wants to edit)