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    Linux on the Sager NP5790 / Clevo M570RU

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by monkey89, Aug 8, 2007.

  1. monkey89

    monkey89 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I'm currently working on installing Gentoo on my new NP5790 laptop. Eventually I'll put all the information onto one webpage, but while I'm working on getting all the hardware to work, I'll use this thread as a jumping-off point. Hopefully others can contribute with advice to get everything working smoothly using their distros of choice.

    To install, I needed a LiveCD with support for the iwl4965 drivers, since I only have a wireless network at home, not a wired one. If you have a wired network, or decide to do a networkless installation, you should be able to install any distro pretty easily. The wired card uses the r8169 gigabit ethernet driver built into the Linux kernel. The hard disk shows up as /dev/sda, and you'll need a distro that has support for Intel's SATA, also built into the kernel.

    I ended up using a daily release of Ubuntu, available at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ . These are updated automatically each day, and sometimes they are too big to fit on one CD (you can use a DVD for these), or act weird - the one I was using did not create a correct X11 configuration, and I needed to fix some typos. Also, GDM didn't work and I needed to use startx to launch a graphical environment.

    I'll post my .config and other files later, but I'm still at work. Some other notes:

    -Sound worked in Ubuntu's LiveCD: the headphone out slot was mapped to the Surround channel, and I believe the speakers were mapped to the Front channel. This may change with a different/newer kernel, I'll have to see.
    -I think the DSDT may need recompiling (do people still need to do this?) to get ACPI to fully work; the BIOS reports a few bugs, and ACPI fails to read the ac_adapter state. Also, fan controls are disabled. However, the temperature and battery readings work.
    -nVidia's 100.14.11 drivers work fine on Gentoo. I had trouble getting them running in Ubuntu; the X server kept crashing.
     
    monkey89, Aug 8, 2007
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  2. nox_uk

    nox_uk Notebook Consultant

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    How are you getting on with this?

    Nox
     
    nox_uk, Sep 19, 2007
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  3. monkey89

    monkey89 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Sorry - I just started my first semester of college so I've been pretty busy over the last month. Hopefully I'll get some free time one of these weekends so I can explore the ACPI idea a little more. As it is, when everything (suspend, lid, etc.) just works fine in Vista, and my computer must be working so I can do homework on it, it's tough for me to boot up Linux and start figuring stuff out. But I've been tempted :)

    Has anyone else been using Linux?
     
    monkey89, Sep 19, 2007
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  4. monkey89

    monkey89 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I don't recall having any - at least on my model, it works with the standard Synaptics driver.
     
    monkey89, Sep 19, 2007
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  5. monkey89

    monkey89 Notebook Enthusiast

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    An update:

    The big issue I was having with suspend seems to have been fixed. With the beta version of Ubuntu, a manually installed (but in the repository) 2.6.24 kernel, and nVidia's 169.04 drivers, suspend works, as long as X is on.

    Unfortunately, I also just got a usb tv tuner with very raw drivers that don't work, so I'm still using Windows for the forseeable future. I didn't test the webcam or cardreader, but as far as I know the cardreader has drivers added in 2.6.23 or 2.6.24, and the webcam has some driver available that might work.
     
    monkey89, Dec 29, 2007
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  6. MegaBUD

    MegaBUD Notebook Evangelist

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    Ill try tiger on this laptop in a month or 2
     
    MegaBUD, Dec 29, 2007
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