Ubuntu 8.10 on my Satellite A215-S7407
I got a wild hair up my ass to try out Ubuntu 8.10. It’s not bad, all in all, but I figured the world would be interested to hear my experiences with it. When it calms down a bit, I’ll be updating the laptop page.
tldr: RTL8187B works very well with 2.6.27 kernel. Ubuntu users, I recommend you wait for things to stabilize a bit before upgrading to 8.10.
One of these days, I’ll get un-lazy and compile myself a kernel that actually works.
Anyways, here’s what I’ve found so far with Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic.
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Problem: “SMP disabled” (possibly related to “BIOS bug, APIC #0 not detected”)
I tried pci=noacpi, and the kernel comes with noapic nolapic already. No joy.
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Problem: Mouse is insane
rmmod psmouse && modprobe psmouse seems to improve, but not completely fix, the situation.
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No fglrx :(
Yeah, they haven’t gotten around to it, yet. I was aware of this in advance and chose to proceed anyway. I can live without hardware acceleration for now.
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RTL8187B support, at last!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read correctly. The driver gives a warning to the effect that it’s experimental and could damage your hardware, but it reports signal strength properly and connects to my WEP network. There is also a new network interface,
wmaster0, which I am very much looking forward to playing with. Much like my original hacks at the RTL8187 driver, I’m working on backporting it for my own use, and I’ll probably end up posting it here, but I haven’t even gotten to the point where the damned thing compiles under older kernels yet. Again, I am not a dedicated kernel hacker, I just hacked at it because it was in my way.
I’m booting the 2.6.24-19-generic kernel after the 8.10 upgrade. The fonts seem to have changed a bit, but the mouse is sane and SMP is working well. fglrx is still absent, most likely due to the fact that I backed up and deleted my xorg.conf (new xorg supposedly doesn’t need a config).
Are you sure that the rtl 8187b driver is running stable? It drops the connection to me, after few minutes, without any notification.
It was working okay for me. Even did a second dist-upgrade under it and wandered around Google for a bit while that was running.
Those problems are in 32 bit version ?
I tried both RC and beta 64bit kubuntu releases and had not experienced the problems you are mentioning here.
This release has 3d open source support for rs690 (xpress 1200) so unless you want every bit of performance in 3d there is no need to use fglrx. The open radeon driver worked quite ok for me and it should be set up and start by default.
One thing that bugs me though is not working suspend/resume. I’ve tried both ubuntu/kubuntu rc and in both suspending results in the screen just going black not turning of and requiring a hard reset after that ;/
I’m running the 32-bit version, yes (for some reason).
Thanks for the tip on fglrx, I’ll check it out.
I haven’t seen suspend/resume working under stock kernels since one of the 7.04 kernels (2.6.20 or 2.6.22, I think). You might want to do swsusp, but I never use suspend/hibernate anyway.
im a total noob. can someone please give me instructions on how to get the wireless enabled on this damned thing? this might be my 3rd failed attempt at linux if i can not get my wireless up and running…
oh. and i forgot to mention. i have no other ways of updating my machine. complicated. i can transport files from another computer, but i am not hard wired on my laptop.
thanks again for any help
Do “
apt-get -d install <package>” on the machine with a link, then sneakernet the package file from/var/cache/apt/<package><stuff-stuff-stuff>.debto the other one.If you’re running the newer 2.6.27 kernel, you should already be good to go. Just do the usual iwconfig/(dhcpcd3|dhclient3) thing — if you’re new, you might find NetworkManager easier to deal with. Just click the wireless icon at the top right of your screen (might look like two terminals instead).
If you’re under the older kernels, you’ll probably need the older drivers with my patch, and it’ll take some more work. There are a README and a FAQ at that link that should help you out. If you still run into problems, my email address is in the “drunk dialing” menu on the right. :-)
I have just updated to 8.10 and can’t for the life of me get the wireless to work. I have all the files, but can’t compile them as the source files are screwy, I realise that this is a unstable release but after trying and getting the same errors in 8.04 I’m close to just giving up.
(I have the 8189 version, so not supported out of the box. :( )
Huh. The 8189 should be supported… Can you dump the output from
dmesg?