Problems with Acer Aspire 5050 5410

Well I just got one of these machines yesterday, and I went to load Suse linux on it and I have no sound...anyone have a soundcard model so a work around can be found? It looks like it is an ATI thing, but acer.com claims it as a soundblaster pro

 

try entering lspci in a terminal to see if your soundcard is recognized.

Code:

sudo lspci | grep Audio

enter your root password when it asks. the lspci command lists all PCI devices on your system, the output of which we pipe (|) to grep, which filters for a string ("Audio" in this case). this is what that outputs for me

Code:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

if nothing comes up, just enter:

Code:

sudo lspci

and look through the various lines that come up for something relating to your audio device.

post up what you have and then we might be able to help. although I would recommend that you maybe try a SuSE community forum and doing a search for your soundcard on there. I personally am only familiar with Ubuntu and Fedora Core, so I don't know what GUI tools SuSE has to configure stuff.

 

sudo lspci brings up command lspci not found...

Maybe I should go back to ubuntu....wonder if anyone has any luck outta the box, suse 10.1 is a big let down anyway

 

you could try /sbin/lspci

strange that isn't included.

 

Ok so switching to ubuntu solved my sound issue...now I just noticed my wireless card isn't being detected (wasn't under suse either)...thats the problem with new laptops I suppose...

WAiting on Acer support...

 

do you know what kind of wireless card it is? if you go to System>Administration>Networking is the card listed?

FYI, Acer will probably tell you to get stuffed and install WinXP

 

Even though their site lists Linux as one of the support OS'?

I still can't figure out the wireless, and the sound is buggy at best...going to work on it some more and then just wait it out

 

Open up a terminal and type in "lspci". If anything like "Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [Airforce One 54g]" or "Broadcom Corporation BCM4308 802.11g Wireless" or basically any braodcom wireless chipset, which is very likely, try here or here, respectively.

ANything else, like Aetheros, try searching UbuntuForums.org for more help.

Intel wireless cards should be supported out-of-box. Maybe try wifi-radar ("sudo apt-get install wifi-radar" after making sure all respositories are enabled) instead of the simplistic GNOME Network Manager.

 

The thing is the card isn't detected at all when I installed...

 

If we knew what kind of wireless card it is, we might be able to help you more. When I installed Ubuntu with an Intel 3945 wifi card, wireless would not work until I installed the network-manager and network-manager-gnome packages.

 

really? well, I'll believe you, but I couldn't find that on the Acer website. Generally, for support purposes, they only want to support "stock" systems, including the OS, since there's only 1 Windows XP, and a bazillion Linux distributions.

you really need to find lspci so that you can find out what the actual chipsets are involved so that you can go on fixing things.

 

http://mavor.com/acer5050.html

There may be hope after all

 

Ok so running the livecd is getting me somewhere

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lspci | grep Audio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 437b (rev 01)

Thats closer than I was

I have two wireless devices detected in the network manager as

Unknown interface (wifi0)

And
Unknown interface (ath0)

I think that last one if my atho wireless card....
Now to do some more research before I install again

 

the wifi0 is a weird interface created by the madwifi driver, the ath0 is your real wireless.

Now, I just tried the update bios suggestion recommened by that link.
turns out the bios version was the same........

I did find out an interesting fact while running suse... the wired network would not work unless I disabled ACPI on boot.
it would come up but would REFUSE to get a functionary IP address instead it would get a weird UP address"169.74.254.0" instead of "192.168.1.whatever"
so....

wireless still has problem even when I do that....

This is a real nice laptop,and works awesomely in windows.... but I REALLY need Linux to do work...

 

on a second look... the bios update did do a few things for me...
one, it stalled my kernel on boot becuase the kernel was ttrying to load the intel HD audio drivers, (which weren't supported by the card.) had to delete the filed in the hda directory of /lib/modules/......../sound/

two, the wired ethernet now works with ACPI on suse boot
three, wireless can actually detect a AP (but not connect I'm trying to figure that one out)

so yeah.. definately do that bios upgrade...

 

you have to run it as root in suse......
after doing "su"

 

Anyone have any tips for how to tackle turning wifi on and off? As there is a little LED that in windows moving the switch toggles, but in linux moving the switch doesn't effect, and I fear this may effect airline travel...

 

could you please post idepth how your got wireless working?

were u using ndiswrapper or madwifi?

 

I installed Dapper and after fixing the screen on first boot, everything else worked (including sound)

Only thing I haven't done so far is mess with 3d accel, because I have never had an ATI card before so breaking X is very likely (I miss nvidia already)

I may look into easy ubuntu, it claims to install ATI drivers (though people seem to be having some problems with it)

 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/B...head-5ead174a0b3294527486cd4d71ded66b40003f25

Really, the time of ATi driver instability is over. They have come lightyears in their driver development. It might not still be as good with features or performance as nVidia, but they'll be just as easy to install now. Especially with non-X1K series cards.

And to the person with Wi-Fi troubles, have you installed the network-manager and network-manager-gnome packages? I've found they've helped the majority of users with their Wi-Fi troubles.

 

I tried that, and it hosed my X server...

 

Sorry, didn't see this post before.

Try "iwconfig <interface name> down" to turn it off, and "iwconfig <interface name> up" to turn it back on.

And with the ATi problem, did you install fglrx from the repos, or use the version from ATi's site? Using the repo version you should have no troubles.