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linux on amilo li 1718

Postby bobosan » Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:03 am

Hi all,
I have amilo li1718 with windows vista... but I would like to migrate to linux.
My intention is to use ubuntu 7.04...
is there anybody that has tried to do it?
or other linux distro?

could you give me some hints?

ciao

roberto
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Postby DarK_JeDi » Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:37 am

Hello bobosan,
I have the same notebook with windows vista and i have recently(2 days ago) installed ubuntu 7.04 on it. there were no problems during the installation. the OS successfully detected the best resolution for the display(1280x800@60Hz) and i was pleasantly surprised. i had no problems with configuring the network via the ethernet controller. however the problems started right after that. the sound system wasn't working at all( i've tested it with the audio player included in the distribution). i've posted about that problem in some linux forums and i have found some decisions about it, but i haven't got any free time to try them. however i think the sound issue won't be a big problem. a bigder problem is the wifi under linux on this notebook. the wifi is a new atheros device, and there is no support for it under linux. i've read some opinions in other forums that the only possible decision for the wifi is to "translate" the windows drivers to linux ones with a program called ndiswrapper . i haven't tried to do this, but when i've free time i intend to make some progress about the problems.
of course, this problems are not so vital for the working on the notebook, but it will be much better with sound and wifi.
for me, a linux newbie, this issues will be not so easy to solve...i think. but i'll try and write as soon as i had made some progress.

if anyone has or had this problems or any problems with the amilo li1718 under linux, please write them down and write how you solve them.

thanks in advance ;)

p.s. i'm sorry if my english is not very good. recently i speak english more then i write or read .
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Postby bobosan » Mon Jul 30, 2007 7:57 am

Hi Dark Jedi
your English is ok.
I've tried to install the same distro and I have the same your problems.
Everything is ok except sound and wifi. I want to check in details all other HW components and other stuffs.
I have not tried for the moment to solve this two points...regarding wifi I have found some code that should be compiled and used but I have not already tried to do it.
Since I'm new for installing linux I have found some book that could help me giving me some info on the "system".
So on august I will spend some time studying a little linux and I hope to solve these two problems.
If I have some news I will tell you.
Ciao
Roberto (BoboSan)
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Ubuntu 7.04

Postby Nirrey » Wed Aug 01, 2007 12:58 am

Hi !

I have tried many distros on my amilo Li1718: Ubuntu 7.04 and Kubuntu 7.04, OpenSuse 10.2, Fedora Core 6... but the common problem is activiting wifi.
Ubuntu 7.04 is the only distro that detects proprietary driver Atheros HAL but I was unable to emulate the Wifi button to activate the wifi chipset (radio on). I have tried fsam7440 http://fsam7440.sourceforge.net/index2.html... but the module doesn't succeed in activating the radio. Maybe there's something to modify in the source code of fsam (disassembling Wbutton.exe might help).
I am interested in any "howto".

Other problem with the all distros: impossible to activate compiz or beryl 3D desktop effects, even when installing the latest ATI proprietary drivers... I just could have openGL driver ATI working but without DRI (direct rendering).
Did somebody succeed in activating Desktop 3D effects ?
Try "glxinfo | grep rendering" and "fglrxinfo" (if you get ATI instead of MESAorg it's OK) and glxgears (framereate should be fast).

Problem only with Ubuntu 7.04: No sound ! That's weird. Does anybody have a "howto" fix it ?

I am going to try Mandriva 2007 and see if it work better (and easier).

Bye
Nirrey
Nirrey
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Postby bobosan » Thu Aug 02, 2007 10:20 am

just one info.
I have the same problem with Window Vista. Finally I have found and installed tha launch manager and Wifi buttom (Fun bottom too) starts work.
So I think we have to find a similar progma for Ubuntu.
In some days I'll have more time to spend on it... hope to solve somethink.
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Postby ronnerus » Sun Aug 05, 2007 9:25 pm

Hi, I am a Li1718 owner, too. Unforunately this notebook is a "pure" Vista machine, the used Atheros wifi even lacks of windows xp drivers, therefore the ndiswrapper solution (which requires a hal extracted from xp drivers) will also fail. But if you are hopeful and wanting to wait for the glorious day on which the madwifis got up-to-date...then you want the wifi module to be powered on :-). There is a tool for acer notebooks, actually a kernel module, called acer_acpi and this do the toggle wifi job as well on the li1718 (interesting, isn't it:-)). There is some handwork to do to get the wifi-button (you have to map the key-event to a little script which is simply send a little string to the acer_acpi-interface in /proc/acpi/acer/wireless, but it is described somewhere in the google universe:-)

Summary: Although madwifi recognized the wifi card, the used hal is not compatible at this time! They have to get the current hal from a fitting win-xp driver, but there is no one!


The sound problems I had were (I think...) due to some funny apic-table-errors, which are in windows usually solved by the driver, it is "patching" the apic-table-entries at load time temporarily. Because of the poor quality of onboard-sound I decided to plug a usb audio device (a hercules imuse pocket lt, about 30 Eur, not that expensive I think...) which made my day. I had no trouble to get it working, now it is even possible to do some little homerecording-sessions with acceptable low-latency (about 5ms, quite few xruns) in ardour! But anyway...

BTW: I'm using Debian 4.0. I think if you are not familliar with linux at all, ubuntu is a quite good choice. Mandriva, RedHat/Fedora or SuSE/OpenSuSE are also well running distros, but due to more or less existing propietaries (each big distro is cooking its own soup :-)) the probabillity to find fitting solution hints in the www is a bit bigger for debian-based (or -styled) distros like ubuntu etc.
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Sound problem solved

Postby Nirrey » Wed Aug 08, 2007 11:00 pm

Hi,

My sound finally works with my amiloL1718 and Ubuntu 7.04 !
I just had to add the following line at the end of the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack
I found that in the french ubuntu forum...

PS: I still have kernel 2.6.20.15 (i haven't tried to update it to 2.6.20.16 for the moment)

Still need to fix the wifi button problem !

Bye!
Nirrey
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Wifi with Linux

Postby Nirrey » Fri Aug 10, 2007 10:48 am

Hi,

I found instructions to install appropriate wlan drivers on my amilo Li1718 (using Ubuntu feisty 7.04 and ndiswrapper) here
Note: I simply installed ndiswrapper using "Add/remove software..." instead of grabbing the package at sourceforge. And I used the GUI version of ndiswrapper to add the driver. I used blacklist file instead of blacklist-common.

I found the previous link here

Now, the driver is OK and my device is recognized (I can get the mac@ of my wlan). I also installed "Wifi-radar "and "Madwifi tools" packages... but still, Wifi-radar doesn't detect available wlans and a manual configuration doesn't connect me to my wlan. Probably because the wlan chipset was not activated with a wbutton.exe-like program.

Hope we will soon have our amilo Li1718 fully operationnal with Linux.
Anyone with the next move ?

Nirrey

If link is not available, here is the procedure:
Chipset: Atheros AR5007EG (rev 01)
PCI ID: 168c:001c

Download the windows 32-bit drivers from here.

Download and install the last version of ndiswrapper (it works from 1.45 version)

Try to remove the module ath_pci to let ndiswrapper to use the wifi.
Code: Select all
sudo rmmod ath_pci
or
Code: Select all
sudo modprobe -r ath_pci


also try put that module in the blacklist of modprobe to avoid his loading on the startup:
Code: Select all
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist


Insert this line:
blacklist ath_pci

Then restart.
When u will boot again.
Load the windows driver it from the uncompress folder:
Code: Select all
sudo ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf


then install to modprobe
Code: Select all
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Nirrey
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Postby johntait » Sun Aug 19, 2007 9:56 pm

If you press F2 on boot you can set the wireless card to turn on at boot up.
that might avoid the problem of programming the switch to do the same job.
beekeeper
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thanks for the sound tip nirrey

Postby johntait » Sat Aug 25, 2007 11:34 pm

The sound thing works like a charm cheers.

You might have found this already but madwifi doesnt work for the Amilo atheros chip

I have wireless working fine using ndiswrapper

The wireless button can be enabled using acerhk.
This link will get you a howto by the chap who solved this http://fscamiloa16xx.googlecode.com

You need to use the net5211 driver with ndiswrapper and remove all madwifi drivers I this forum link you get instructions for this
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3205543

If you install Envy it will handle installing the graphics card drivers automatically get it here http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html
beekeeper
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Re: Sound problem solved

Postby Segarra » Fri Aug 31, 2007 11:05 pm

Nirrey wrote:Hi,

My sound finally works with my amiloL1718 and Ubuntu 7.04 !
I just had to add the following line at the end of the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=3stack
I found that in the french ubuntu forum...


Bye!


Hello, anyones, knows if that solution works on Amilo Li 1705?
Thanks
Segarra
 
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madwifi support for atheros card :-)

Postby Kobe » Mon Dec 17, 2007 8:20 am

Hello to all. I want to mark, that madwifi drivers for Li1718 Atheros wifi card
are available for download from here:

http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/ma ... 007.tar.gz

I'm working with Slackware 11.0 and wifi is working with that drivers, but also
have to use acerhk driver to activate wifi and led of notebook =)

How to install acerhk and patch it for FSC Li1718 is described upper at this
forum.

P.S. Sorry for my bad English =)
Kobe
 
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Postby roadrash » Mon Dec 17, 2007 9:51 am

Well done for getting your Li1718 working with Linux. I don't know if you noticed but someone on this forum could have saved you a lot of time because he wrote a auto instalation script that does all that for you and also gets the special function keys working as well. see here
I currently have the Linux Mint KDE edition working on my Li1718 and it auto starts the wireless network upon boot up.
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reply to roadrash

Postby Kobe » Mon Dec 17, 2007 1:47 pm

Yes, i try to use that script fo ubuntu, but i had problem with wifi drivers that are described here i.e. not working properly with my kernel and linux OS, i.e. i have performance problem with network connection and ndiswrapper and windows drivers. The problem is that with ndiswrapper on connection with 11mbps AP, i can't reach more that 3 mbps. With new madwifi drivers, that problem isn't exist.

That's why, i wrote on this forum, so i apologize for that!
Kobe
 
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Drivers

Postby paraz1tu » Tue May 13, 2008 2:02 am

All drivers for Amilo Li 1718 with OS XP .. we can find here ->http://letoltokozpont.hu/letoltes_driver_reszletes.php?k=12&g=174&a=557
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