Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Ubuntu on an Acer Aspire 5000


Okay, this is just me posting the kind of blog post I wish I could have googled for before I installed Linux on my laptop. Would have saved me some time... I hope it comes in handy to someone else.


Hardware: [1]
  • Processor: Mobile AMD Turion 64 1600MHz
  • Memory: 1GB DDR SDRAM, 128MB of which dedicated to video.
  • Graphics adapter: SiS M760GX
  • Audio: RealTek ALC203 AC 97 Codec
  • Ethernet adapter: SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet
  • Wireless network adapter: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318
  • Storage: Seagate ST9100822A Momentus 4200.2 100 GB ATA

Partition layout:



In retrospect, 4GB swap was really a mouthful since in practice swap is rarely touched. I could have gone by with 2GB for hibernation, but at least now I have room for that 2GB RAM upgrade...

32 GB for the root file system is a lot. I tend to accumulate a lot of crap in ~ so it's nice to have a safety margin. I made sure that /opt is large enough to contain a copy of /home in case I need to do something drastic with root.

Works out of the box:

  • Sound. Audiophiles would probably not buy this computer but the on board codec does the job for me.
  • Graphics, Xorg plays along just fine at native 1280x800 resolution. No configuration needed. No DRI, slow 3D!
  • Ethernet adapter.
  • Hibernation just works.
  • Touchpad. The first thing I did was disable "tap to click". My fine motor skills are simply inadequate for that.
  • 896 MB of memory is not terribly much but I find it surprisingly hard to provoke the machine into swapping.

Issues:
  • Fan control is borked in 10.10 (Maverick)! For some reason, the fan kicks in too late to prevent the CPU from transferring lethal amounts of heat to the graphics adapter, which overheats and freezes the computer. Solution: download Ubuntu 10.4 and hope this gets fixed in Natty.
  • Onboard SiS graphics adapter does not play nicely with frame buffer console. Solution: blacklist frame buffer console by appending the line "blacklist vga16fb" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
  • Wireless is some proprietary Broadcom crap which does not work out of the box. Solution: use wired connection, run jockey-gtk and install b43-fwcutter Wireless should be up on reboot.
Other than the stuff Casper installs for you, I installed sensors-applet for monitoring the temperature. Anticipating the Maverick move from f-spot [2].  I also installed the shotwell photo manager. For PHP development I installed apache2 and php5. I'm currently evaluating Netbeans 7 Beta [3] as my IDE, so I have installed it in my user directory. NB 7 needs the Sun JDK which I downloaded and installed to /opt/java. 

Other software sources I have added:
That's it, really. I will add content to this post whenever I stumble over some new issue.




Footnotes:
  • [1] http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/notebook/0000/Acer/Aspire5000/Aspire5000sp2.shtml
  • [2] http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/0055221/Ubuntu-Replaces-F-Spot-With-Shotwell
  • [3] http://netbeans.org/community/releases/70/
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