Hi,
I recently got an Amilo 1718 and went through a fresh Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) install onto this. As we all know, the base install's easy - it's the wireless etc that is a bit more tricky. To save anyone else going through the same pain(!), I thought I'd post the steps I went through below. I know someone else who has just got an Amilo 1718 as well, and he followed the same instructions which worked fine for him too.
This is all out there in some shape or form, but I thought it might be worth posting to have in one place. This will give you video acceleration (with the Radeon 200M), wireless (Atheros 5007EG with hotkeys working) and audio (worked from the start). Sorry if this is duplicating anything, but I figure if it helps one person it's worth it!
Pre-requisitesFree space on disk - either shrink Vista partition using disk manager in Vista, or another tool, or delete it
Go into BIOS at boot time and turn Wireless Option to On (not sure if this makes a difference, but I did it anyway)
1. Install Ubuntu 8.04 from install CD
2. When fully installed and rebooted, log in
3. Plug in ethernet cable and ensure connectivity (bar at top will show network icon and status)
4. Start terminal (gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever)
5. 'sudo aptitude update' (will update package list from repositories to bring in list of latest versions). This runs periodically anyway, but this will force it now.
6. update notification will appear in top bar showing all updated packages. Double click and let it do this OR type 'sudo aptitude upgrade' to do it from command line
7. Once all updates are in, reboot the box (we are doing this mainly for the kernel updates so we have the latest kernel, and to install the wireless driver)
8. Once the machine is back up, follow the steps below:
NetworkEnable HotkeysOpen terminal:
wget
http://fscamiloa16xx.googlecode.com/svn ... sca16xx.shchmod 755 fsca16xx.sh
sudo ./fsca16xx.sh setup
Check the line
options acerhk force_series=6805 autowlan=1
in /etc/modprobe.d/options is present. If not, add it.
Log out and back in again
Install and configure Madwifi (wireless driver) - disable built in OS Atheros support using Restricted manager
- System / Administration / Hardware Drivers - ensure that enabled is not checked beside atheros support
- download MadWifi from branch madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6 (
https://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/branche ... -0.10.5.6/)
- special tarball already prepared at
http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/ma ... 604.tar.gz - this contains the new HAL supporting the Atheros 5007.
Don't use the madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz or other. These have problems with the new kernels. The one above is the one you want. It is the latest version, and supports the 5007 out the box without being a patched version of something else.
- from the madwifi lists, this "is currently in a branch, but should hopefully, barring any other issues, be migrated to trunk soon."
- expand this into a directory on your disk (keep this after you have installed - see
IMPORTANT below!)
- make clean
- sudo make install - this should remove older modules installed as part of linux-restricted-modules-generic
if not, do sudo make uninstall OR
manually sudo rmmod or sudo modprobe -r on ath_pci and ath_hal
- blacklist ath5k module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
- make sure Wireless button is ON!
- sudo modprobe ath_pci to install module
- network manager (icon in bar at top) should show networks when left clicked. If not, right click and check wireless is an option.
If you hit any problems, to validate underlying driver is there:
- use lscpi -vv, lspci -vnnd 168c: and athinfo to test if needed
- iwconfig should show existence of ath0 device
Will NEED reboot to load new HAL if old HAL was loaded, so if in doubt, reboot (then check wireless is ON - LED on bottom row of keyboard)
Notes- When you get "Hardware didn't respond as expected" it's a sign that you have some other driver that
tried to initialize the chipset and failed. Even the new HAL cannot recover the card after that. The
system needs to be rebooted. But first make sure that no other version of MadWifi is installed.
- if you can't get this working, NDISwrapper can handle this card too. I found the steps below, but haven't used them myself.
- if driver is required for NDISWrapper, use download
http://www.atheros.cz/download/drivers/ ... 6-whql.zip - unzip it, run ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf
IMPORTANTImportant note around system kernel updatesThe new driver has been installed as a kernel module. When the kernel is updated, or the generic modules updates, this can often remove this dependency and mean the wireless doesn't work on the next reboot after an update.
In this case, use the directory with the driver in it (you kept this from above, hopefully!). Just follow the steps again.
make clean
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci
(if you have problems - you may need to remove the old one by sudo rmmod ath_pci and reboot first)
That's the module rebuilt for the new kernel and reinstalled. Shouldn't take you more than about 20 seconds. Once they integrate the 5007 functions into the main madwifi trunk then this should hopefully just come down via the updates. Until then, we'll have to do this. It's not that much of a pain... honest!
ATI DriverGet the driver from here
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linu ... adeon.htmlMake sure you turn off any existing support in the Restricted manager first
Install the new driver
(I have tried everything else (built in support, EnvyNG etc). Nothing worked except this. Needs a full shutdown and restart (so the hardware powers down, not just soft restart) after install. Not sure why, but on the twice I have done this the new driver and acceleration won't kick in until this has happened.)
If you want the desktop effects on, just switch them via the menus
Install compizconfig-settings-manager via Synaptic / whatever other way you like
Use System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effects Settings to play about to your heart's content... there's some nice stuff there!