Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:
  • Finger Print reader
  • WebCam
  • Explore the TurboMemory options

2 comments:

Ryan said...

I'm working on the same project and am fairly new to linux. Adding model=lenovo to the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file did the trick for my speakers and headphone jack but I'm having trouble with the video card drivers still (even after suing envy).

After finding your post I think I'll give envy another try since I have recently performed a default rediscover on my video card driver.

Unknown said...

I recently bought an ASUS F3SA myself. Don't have the fingerprint reader though. Sound is working now thanks to the previously mentioned 'model=lenovo' options setting. For video: ATI restricted drivers work like a charm. Just using the 'default' synaptics install option. Ow I did upgrade to 8.04 for that. The 7.? version I had on CD had lousy video card drivers (they made the X framebuffer all go garbled when trying to ctrl-alt-f1 to console. Alt-f7'ning back to X made pretty LSD-like clourezzz). But the new kernel and drivers fixed that for me.
Next issue is getting the build-in camera to work properly. It is recognized in kernel but the applications I tried so far all crashed and burned...