Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: Dave Meikle, Johan Dahlin
• Make: Fujitsu Seimens
• Model: Amilo A7640

Current Issues

1) Everything has went without a hitch but when running a dist-upgrade on Colony-3 last night (02/09/2005) the following happened:

With the current kernel image for i386 the battery status sometimes does not update. This is like on many previous kernels before. The original one installed with Colony-3 works perfectly. Will try to work out what this is. I don't think this is a bug as it is probably the crappy acpi in this laptop.

07/09/2005 - I sourced the old code for the kernel before the upgrade (2.6.12-6). This has fixed the issue. I am going to have a check and see what has changed in the code.

2) New Issue - After an upgrade this morning (21/09/2005) and then a reboot X would no longer start and my sound had gone. This is due to a problem with udev see bugs ["http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12915"] and ["http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=15932"].

A quick roll back to the old version of udev (udev_0.060-1ubuntu12_i386) solved the issue. Will keep checking the bugs and re-test any fixes.

Hardware details (x86)

Breezy Install Notes (x86)

Installed using the following parameters:

linux vga=771

Installation was fine. Only Problem I had after installation was getting the Wireless to work using driverloader (NDISWrapper did not even entertain me!). Here is what happend:

I installed the kernel headers for my kernel and then driverloader. Upon the driverloader install it tried to compile the driverloader module but couldn't as it was looking for gcc-3.4. So I then installed the gcc-3.4 package. This allowed the module to be built but there was a problem inserting it into the kernel.

Upon checking dmesg it showed that it couldn't insert it as the magic number where different - this was due to it picking up gcc-4.0 for the module and the kernel was compiled with gcc-3.4 (this is due to the gcc symlink pointing to gcc-4.0 when compiling the module).

To solve this I ran the following: cd /usr/bin sudo rm gcc sudo ln -s gcc gcc-3.4

NOTE: You could all use export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 and then run dldrconfig, but then you would have to do this each time a new kernel update came in.

This then allowed me to build the module and insert it. I then followed the standard procedure for setting driverloader up.

Notes (x86)

Most things in the Laptop just worked. which was pretty impressive due to the customisation I used to have to with other distros.

The Wireless Card (Intersil 3886) requires NDISWrapper or Linuxant to run correctly. This is due to no native Linux driver being available - prism54.org is working on one apparently. Hibernation is not quite working. It's not possible to query how much battery powers there is left, so applets will not work.

25/08/2005 - Johan, I can query how much battery power that is left <acpi -b>. This used to be a problem for me on other Distros but never on Ubuntu. The standard Gnome Battery Charge Monitor has always worked for me. If it doesn't work for you maybe we can bang our heads together and work out why.

03/09/2005 - Dave: acpi -b just reads /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state which has the "present rate" field always set to 0 mA. I reported this on warty as http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6628 and it's still present using breezy. Seems to be an ACPI interpreter incompability issue. Have you modified your ACPI bytecode or done something else to make it work? I never got pcmcia cards working either, maybe it's a problem with my hardware, dunno. I also tested hibernation on breezy and it seems to work just fine. I'm using the kernel command line option acpi_sleep=s3_bios, it might be needed, haven't tested without yet. --Johan