Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty on ASUS A6J Laptop

I’ve been really pleased with the ASUS A6J since the day I got it which was almost a year ago. Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 and Edgy Eft 6.10 both worked great directly from installation but Feisty 7.04 has been plagued with problems after problems on this laptop.

Specs of my ASUS A6J

• Centrino Core Duo 1.6ghz
• 1 Gig ram
• 80 Gig hard drive
• Nvidia GeForce Go 7300
• DVD dual layer DVD RW with Light scribe
• Gigabit wired ethernet
• 802.11a/b/g Wireless

Output of lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 110M / GeForce Go 7300 (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 01)
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev b3)
04:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 08)
04:01.2 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 17)
04:01.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 08)


Stuff that Worked

In general, most stuff worked well but the following are some of the stuff that worked really well.

• Fire wire worked really well out of the box, I recall having to tinker with hal when on Dapper in order to mount fire wire drives because it kept mounting it as a network device.

• SD card reader works as well as inserting usb thumb drives.

• Burning of Dual Layer dvd works fine with Gnomebaker

• My camera was also recognized by gphoto out of the box.

• S-video out works but not out of the box. Requires the following to be added to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  Please use this as a guide and tweak the Monitor and Screen settings like TVStandard, sync and refresh rates for your own Television.
  
Section "Device"
Identifier "TVOut"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 1
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Television"
HorizSync 30.0 - 50.0
VertRefresh 60.0 - 60.0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "TV Screen"
Device "TVOut"
Monitor "Television"
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
Option "TVStandard" "PAL-B"
SubSection "Display"
Modes "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection



Stuff that DONT work aka are broken

• Built-in webcam does not work
• Hibernation is broken big time, system freezes completely when attempt to hibernate. I have not got a fix for this at the moment.
• Wifi works but rather unreliably and very much slower than on Windows XP with the same access points. Tried disabling IPv6 according to Google but does not seem to help. Seems like the ipw3945 module needs more work.

• Wired Ethernet does not work if the laptop is booted without the network cable plugged in. Need to reload module and restart networking in order to get it working again. Never had this problem before Feisty.

  
rmmod r8169
insmod r8169
/etc/init.d/networking restart


• Beryl looks broken on fresh installation. Fix involves added the following line

  
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"


  into /etc/X11/xorg.conf under the Device section for the Nvidia card.

  
Section "Device"
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA Default Card"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Screen 0
EndSection


  Note that this is for the non-free Nvidia driver.

Links

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/AsusV6J
http://mdessus.free.fr/Divers/Asus_v6j_linux.html