Ubuntu on Acer Aspire 5601

Tesco have been doing very good deals on laptops as part of their seasonal 'Back to School' range. I couldn't resist and picked up an Acer Aspire 5601. Naturally it comes preinstalled with Window XP, which I promptly wiped and installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

Everything I essentially wanted from the laptop works. There are few bits and pieces that don't quite have all the driver support in place yet.

Graphics
X.org Graphics wanted to run at 1024x768 and wasn't offering anything better. The display is a 1280x800. Installing the 915resolution package will solve that for you, after you run the 915resolution command manuall to tel it what resoulution you want to use.

Sound
Doesn't work. The chipset is an ALC883, which doesn't appear to have support yet. A test driver is to be included in the ALSA 1.0.12 release, Ubuntu currently runs 1.0.10, so I guess I may have to wait for that, unless I build and install it myself.

Network - Ethernet
Work great.

Networking - Wireless
Haven't managed to test this properly yet. In my initial test it isn't receiving an IP address from my work's DHCP server, although the Ethernet card does.

I've installed the ieee80211 and ipw3945 packages by from ieee80211.sf.net and ipw3945.sf.net. The /var/lg/syslog messages look more promising, but I can't test them properly until I get back to work and have a wireless network to connect to. However, there may still be issues as their still doesn't appear to be a wlan0 network device.

Update: Solution found here: use the ieee80211 at version 1.1.11 rather than the more recent 1.1.13. The latter release appears to no longer support the ipw3945 properly.

Networking - Bluetooth
The Bluetooth device simply isn't detected. I can't even find what chipset it could be. This one is a pity as I want to try setting it to automatically lock the screen when I walk away from it taking my Bluetooth phone with me.

Hibernate
Needed to manually install the hibernate package and add the apm=on kernel option to the /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Sleep/Suspend
Doesn't recover properly. Powers on and the hard disk works a way for a minute or so, but the display remains resolutely blank. I haven't tried this again since I installed the 915resolution, so that might have an effect.

USB
Works fine. I've only tried it with a number of USB disks, including an iPod Video. No problems other than a new USB key (512MB also from Tesco) that didn't want to unmount. Claimed it was busy even when it wasn't and a sync had already been issued. Adding entries to /etc/fstab seems to have stopped that on subsequent occasions. However, unplugging and plugging in again too soon causes the device to jump from /dev/sdb1 to /dev/sdc1, which caused it to ignore the new line I had added to /etc/fstab.

Multi-Card Reader
Doesn't seem to know it even has one. Tried plugging in an SD card, but nothing shows up even in /var/log/syslog.

OVerall it is a very nice, well spec'd and light-weight laptop.