On Saturday, February 05, 2011 03:14:39 Luther Woodrum wrote: > Yes, Sean, that is a very good site for laptop info. > > I bought an Acer aspire 4550 laptop not long ago. amd64 2core, 2GB mem, > 160GB hd, 15".
I had a quick look at the Acer website, mainly because I wanted to see if I could find out further specifications. Not sure why, but their website doesn't seem to list the Aspire 4550 specifically, but lists other models in the line (4551, 4552, 4553). > Centos and ubuntu 10.10 did not support the Atheros 9500 series wireless > chips. I found that the kernel has to be at least 2.6.34 for the support. > As mentioned before, the new hardware has a lag for support. > > Forunately, I just got a later kernel and compiled using slackware, > and everything worked the way it should. I did like the kde screen that > slackware displayed. > > As for older laptops being more likely to work, recently a friend had > a 512MB old acer laptop with a dead windows system. > > Ubuntu: No level of Ubuntu would boot for installation. Just start and > hang forever with a blank blue (ha ha) screen with a blinking cursor > in the upper left corner. Yeah, this has been known to happen. Grub2 now supports graphical bootup right at boot time, which Ubuntu uses, and this is occasionally problematic. If for some reason you had been hell-bent on Ubuntu it might have been possible to do a text-based install using the "alternate installer" distro, and then manually configuring X.org. [Both I and Joe have run into similar problems, which the "alternate installer" version was able to get around.] Seems like you're familiar with multiple distros though, which is a good thing -- certainly helped in this case. > At least for an hour, anyway. I tried it several times before I gave up > Centos installed OK. Slackware installed OK. > > I left centos on it because it is easier for her to know how to get new > packages via yum, rpm, apt, etc. and add to the repository lists. > > There was no wireless, so I used a Belkin usb wireless antenna. > No problem with the usb wireless, except that it is a pain to keep having > to fiddle with the configuration. > > I got the rpms for wicd and urwid. wicd is great. It finds all of the > active networks and their available info essid .. sorts them by signal > strength, shows you the list click on your choice to connect. > > You can give networks passwords so you don't have to keep entering them. > You can set an option that automatically connects to the available > network with the best signal strength.If that goes away, it automatically > finds another one. Main reason I wrote back was to likewise praise Wicd -- I've been using it for at least a year and it's really been a pleasure to use. It now has at least three client versions -- an ncurses-based text client, a Gnome GUI client, and a Qt GUI client, all of which use the same stored configuration. It's really nice to be able to use the ncurses client to be able to easily set up wireless when working without X. Prior to trying Wicd I was having repeated problems with Network Manager with upgrades breaking it, and not being able to figure out how to fix it. > The down side was that the audio did not work properly. > You could hear it, but it was very low volume. I ran into this problem > once in 2005, on a desktop, and I did not have time to pursue it then. > I thought maybe alsa was muted or something, but that was not the case. > All the settings appeared normal. If I fiddled around with alsa enough > I could probably get it to work. I've run into this too. Occasionally I have not been able to fix it, even with playing with every setting in 'alsamixer', except to set the volume in Windows if it's a dual-boot box. :-/ I don't have a good explanation for why this happens, but I at least wanted you to know that it's real and that it's not "you". -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell Apr 6 - Introduction to IPv6 May 4 - Inkscape
