Submitted by j.a.watson on February 10, 2009 - 7:58am
I have installed RC3 on my three laptops, with varying results:
- HP 2133 Mini-Note: VIA CPU and associated chips. Installation went very smoothly, and for the most part it works quite well. This system has a Chrome 9 graphic adapter, and there is no openchrome driver in MEPIS, but it runs the same version of X11 as Mandriva 2009, so I was able to lift the drivers from there, and it works great. (For purposes of installation and initial startup the VESA drivers included with MEPIS are adequate.) I still have a problem with sound - there is none - but I haven't made any serious attempt to figure that out yet. According to lspci -v MEPIS sees a VIA VT1708/A Azalia HDAC sound controller, and is using the snd-hda-intel driver for it.
- Fujitsu Lifebook S6510: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and associated chips. Installation went very smoothly, and MEPIS even got resolution on the external display right. Oddly, however, this laptop also has no sound... very suspicious... and MEPIS says that it is also using the snd-hda-intel driver... Hmmmm.
- Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S2110: AMD Turion 64 CPU and associated chips, ATI Radeon display adapter. There is a minor problem in the installation (and subsequent configuration), because there is no Swiss German (de_CH) keyboard map. There is a Swiss French, which is close enough that I can use it, but there really should be a Swiss German. Odd. I was pleased and impressed that the installation got the ATI Radeon 200M display adapter right. Oh, and good news, the sound works on this one! Bad news, though, the Broadcom 4401 wired ethernet adapter doesn't work. Good news, the Atheros AR5413 wireless does work, so I am not left without internet connection while I try to figure the Broadcom out. The Broadcom shows in lspci, but there is no trace of it in the MEPIS Network Assistant. Hmmm... Broadcom 4401... I wonder if the enable/disable Broadcom b43 and b44 drivers in the Network Assistant has to do with this. Sounds likely... change and reboot... Yup, that was it. Hooray! So now the S2110 is completely working... well, except for the Swiss keyboard.
Well done, MEPIS team, I am very pleased and impressed with M8.0
jw 10/2/2009
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Update: Keyboard ok now
by j.a.watson - Feb 10 2009 - 9:11am
I have the Swiss German keyboard working properly now. This may not be the "right" or "preferred" solution, if MEPIS is handing the keyboard differently for some reason, but by looking at the xorg.conf file on the other Linux distributions that I have installed on that laptop, I found the following:
Original:
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbLayout" "de_FR"
Working:
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbLayout" "ch(de)"
In fact, the layout can be specified as simply "ch", because German is the default for Swiss, but it works just fine either way.
Anyway, I'm pleased, MEPIS 8.0 RC3 is working 100% on the Lifebook S2110. Now to attack the sound problem on the other two...
jw
Swiss German keyboard
by StormyJerry - Feb 10 2009 - 9:02am
I think you can get it by clicking KMenu --> Settings --> Regional & Accessibility --> Keyboard Layout. Double-click the Switzerland entry so it moves to the Active layouts panel, then use the pull-down menu for Layout variant to select the version of "de" you want.
Works for Swiss German, but no Swiss French
by j.a.watson - Feb 11 2009 - 3:44am
Well, that sort of works, but there are still several problems with it. The most obvious is that it sets up a keyboard for "Switzerland" with no layout variants available, so now you can only get Swiss German, and not Swiss French - the opposite of the original problem. There is also no option to suppress the deadkey function, so programmers and administrators are not likely to be entirely pleased with this. Last, but not least, these settings take effect only after login, so for the login screen itself, the keyboard is still not working properly.
So, for the time being at least, I'm going to stay with the modifications to the xorg.conf file, as they seem to provide the best all-around functionality.
Thanks for the help.
jw
Have a search for Azalia in
by rich_c - Feb 10 2009 - 8:51am
Have a search for Azalia in the Wiki (www.mepis.org/docs) for a potential solution to the sound thing...
Bowlkook on Mepislovers
Fixed in Latest Patches
by j.a.watson - Feb 11 2009 - 3:46am
The latest MEPIS patches, which came through this morning, make this change also, so it is no longer to comment out the line manually. Thanks!
jw
That Did the Trick!
by j.a.watson - Feb 10 2009 - 12:12pm
Oh Yeah! Thanks! That did the trick - comment out options snd-hda-intel position_fix=2 in / etc/ modprobe.d/ snd-hda-intel, and the HP 2133 is now making beautiful sound! This fix does not work on the Lifebook S6510, unfortunately, so I will be digging a bit further into the docs and forums. But for the time being I'm a very happy camper, everything is now working just great on the HP 2133 with M8.0 RC3!
Thanks very, very much for the tip.
jw