Ubuntu Wiki

• Contact: PacShady

• Brand: Medion
• Model: MD96420

• Website: http://www.medion.de/md96420/au/flash.html

Current Issues

Sound and Wireless don't work out of the box. Webcam and DVB TV Tuner card don't work at all. It initially took several weeks to get this laptop in a somewhat usable state. Support for wireless and sound are slowly improving. Most likely these problems are caused by or linked to Bug #1.

System Info

bios-version: M2.02
system-manufacturer: Notebook
system-product-name: MIM2300
system-version: Not Applicable

Hardware details

Notes

1. 3D Acceleration works once proprietary nVidia video drivers are installed.

2. Sound currently doesn't work with ALSA out of the box. A patch has been made, which involves recompiling the ALSA driver until such time as the patch is applied upstream by ALSA. Details on how to recompile alsa-driver for this card can be found here.

3. I managed to get Wireless working by using the drivers here with ndiswrapper. The only way to extract the drivers though is to run the driver setup under wine, then when the setup fails with an error BEFORE pressing OK go to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/ and copy the RaLink folder somewhere (maybe your desktop, or wherever), because as soon as you click OK on the setup error the driver folder within that directory will be deleted. This setup, however, may be unstable with certain wireless access points (notably, Netgear-brand routers). It should work, it may just take several times to connect. Ensure WICD is being used as the network manager, as KNetworkManager seems to fail in detecting wireless networks for some reason. UPDATE: I managed to get the official drivers from this page for Linux to work on my newly installed 64bit system. It should work on 32bit as well, but I think due to my messing around I couldn't get it to tell the difference between WPA and WPA2 networks then. But it works now on a fresh system, so it should work. You want the RT2860 PCI/mPCI/CB driver, follow the instructions in the README, and remember to "sudo make install" after you compile (doesn't tell you that in the readme) to enable it properly at boot. The interface is on ra0 by default instead of wlan0 so remember to set that in WICD's preferences.

4. For some reason, hibernate and suspend don't work on 64bit. As soon as the system suspends or hibernates it wakes up. Changing to uswsusp as the suspend/hibernate controller doesn't fix the problem either. Suspend worked in 32bit for the most part (network interfaces seemed to delay slightly, so use WICD because it can handle reconnecting to networks when cards become available better than KNetworkManager on resume), but hibernate seemed a bit unstable and sometimes crashed on 32bit on resume.

This laptop is currently in poor condition mainly due to the difficult sound and wireless setups, but also due to failure of webcam and the accompanying DVB TV Tuner card. Until reliable patches are made and integrated into the main packages, don't expect to have a fun time trying to install Linux without some hard work.

CategoryLaptop