Having fun with V3000Z Ubuntu combo, still have unsolved problems though

So far I am pretty happy with my new V3000z and installed latest Ubuntu Edgy 6.10.

The Nvidia Go6150 works fine under nvidia driver v1.09629. 3D Beryl works fine and experience smooth 3D animation.

Speed/Power are controlled using powernowd that installed by default. The steps are 800/1600/1800/2000MHz. Temp is definitely warm at HDD side, but don't feel any uncomfortable hot on my lap. Fan is rarely spinning.

Intel(Contex) HD sound care is recognized, and works loud enough for me. But I still feel it is not as loud as in XP.

Media quick button works fine except quickplay button. The sound can be mute, and showing the volume slide bar which didn't happen in XP Home to me.

IRDA Remote controller perform some function in Movie Player. The page up/down and scroll up/down works with all apps.

The fun part is working with multiple boot loaders. Now I have XP Home, Ubuntu, and Embedded Windows XP which is QuickPlay. Actually the QuickPlay's Embedded XP never shut down even you power off the machine, it does hibernate all the time. Since I install the Grub boot loader, every time the machine will go to boot loader first and let you select which OS you will go. The flow is like this: I start Ubuntu and hibernate it(select hibernate or just close the hing), then push the power button to wake it up. Now it goes back to Grub again, and I can start QuichPlay and watch DVD a little bit. Then I power off the QuickPlay. Power up again and select Ubuntu, guess what, it goes back where I left off. It's fun.
Problems haven't solved:
1. The headphone jack doesn't sense the plug and not working at all.
2. Broadcom wireless is not working using default BCM43xx firmware. I haven't tried NDISWrapper yet. The funny thing is the wireless switch even unfunctional, seems the card is powered by driver and can't be turned off.
3. Dual monitor seems not working to me.
4. Shutdown screen seems unsync, and the logo is way of ugly.

 

Download automatix2, that will make installing ndiswrapper, and a bunch of other programs, much easier to get and setup. you can also get nvidia Drivers through automatix2.

I have heard that your wireless card is one of the more difficult to setup, try to google your card and Ubuntu, see what that comes up with. Just as a side note 6.10 would not recognize my wireless card either, but 6.06LTS recognized it without any issues.

 

As far as I know, most wireless cards aren't supported in 6.10. They work fine in 6.06 usually. I find 6.06 to be generally more stable anyway.

 

Yeah, I have ndiswraper already. Just don't want to use right away. I am trying to find native solution, but seems no such luck.

And also the sound card problem is already known everywhere. Just the dual screen is a bit troublesome to me now.

 

Unfortuantely, native support is still unstable ( http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=devices) and as you mentioned, there are workarounds on the net for the sound issue.

 

Yeah, the sound is another side of pain. I tried patch file on both ALSA 1.0.12 and 1.0.13. They both worked, but only work one way for me. The patch file fixed to jack output no matter what, and speaker gone forever. .

I rather going back to 1.0.11 without patch. Because the Altec Lance speaker is really loud. Besides, system recognize the jack as SPIF output.

 

Over on the Ubuntu forums, some people have gotten the wireless card to work.

I tried doing a Dappper instalation a few weeks ago, but had to switch back to XP, cause I needed the HD space used by Ubuntu and I didn't have time to fiddle with it and I also needed wireless support, which I never managed to get, and no I can't try, cause my HDD failed.

ndiswrapper generally works from what I hear. It takes some love though.

The bcm43xx driver I have hear works if you get the specific firmware for the card. The how to I saw used wine to extract the firmware from the softpaq driver on the compaq site. It then replaced the default firmware with the new firmware. Like I said above though, works with some love.

Haven't heard anything about getting the headphone jack to work.

I had the same problem with the shutdown screens. They almost looked like watching a scrambled TV channel, but not quite as bad.

And I dunno if I can help you with the dual monitor one, I never got to mess with that myself.

 

I have no other way but stick with ndiswrapper right now.

To talk about disk space, I give 22G HDD to Ubuntu including 1.5G swap space. My intention is to give some extra space for future RAM upgrading. With 20G actual space, I still left 15G free after I install lot of packages including all Tex support and almost all media related software.

Nvidia-settings doesn't allow me to overclock the GPU even I turn on the coolbit. I guess there is no way to change any clock in Go 6150 mobo GPU. I don't want to overclock it, but downclock. But still have no idea how.

powersaved controller is another annoying issue for undervolting fans like me. It doesn't allow me to change any voltage, and no howto can be found on this. Although ACPI mode is available in Gentoo, I still don't get it. It would be nice for someone can work on powersaved.

 

I was looking into undervolting earlier. if you search this forum you'll find the thread. basically you have to hard code the voltages you want into the kernel and recompile. it's not too treacherous, and there was a complete howto for Ubuntu.