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Changes

  • Apr 4, 2007: new page
  • Apr 17, 2007: card reader section
  • May 12, 2007: some updates (webcam, fingerprint, ACPI)
  • Jun 21, 2007: wireless
  • Oct, 2008: update

Contents

General

Good laptop with good support in Linux.

  • CPU: Intel Core2 Duo, T5600
  • Chipset: Intel ICH7
  • Memory: 1G RAM, shared with graphic card
  • Graphic card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1450, 1400x1050 display
  • HDD: 120G SATA
  • I/Os: 3x USB, S-Video, Authentec 1600 Fingerprint reader, Syntek webcam
  • One ExpressCard 54 slot
  • Card reader: SD/MMC/MS
  • LAN: RealTek RTL8111/8168B 1Gbit
  • WLAN: Intel IPW3945
  • Audio: Intel HDA – Realtek, line-out, microphone/line-in, built-in stereo speakers, built-in microphone
  • CD: MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-850S
  • Mouse: Synaptics touchpad, 2 buttons

Some program outputs

Kernel and the system

At the time of the writing this page I use 2.6.28-rc2-mm1. Here is my .config.

ACPI and power management

Good support (asus_acpi) except few problems. It's needed to load acpi-cpufreq twice to get it working. Further problems are described in keyboard section.

Both swsusp (suspend to disk) and hwsusp (suspend to ram) work without vbetool or something. I use pm-utils and gnome-power-manager for suspending and hibernating
Note, that there was a problem in 2.6.21-rcX, but it was solved.

As menitoned above, cpufreq works with acpi-cpufreq.

This model (all features) is fully supported in asus_laptop module.

Memory cards

SD card works as an usb storage device – no problem to get it working.

Special keys

There are some Fn+ buttons which work, even buttons above the keyboard. The only problem now is that brightness up and down keys don't work with this error in dmesg:

ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [\_SB_.PCI0.P0P2.VGA_.LCDD] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.SBRG.EC0_._Q0F] (Node ffff81003ff07f70), AE_NOT_FOUND

I slighty changed DSDT, since it seems to be related to Windows, compiled it and used hex in "include custom DSDT" kernel option.

Graphic card

Ati Mobility Radeon X1450 works fine with radeonhd driver. Xorg configuration file needed some changes though.

Touchpad

No problem as far as I can see.

Audio interface

There is no problem when using new enough ALSA. Both internal and external I/Os work.

Wireless LAN interface

Works with mac80211 and iwl3945. Even AP mode should work with patched mac80211 (haven't tested yet).

Bluetooth

Works very well in gnome. Nokia N80 is detected and obex file transmissions are no problem. Also BT HID mouse works fine.

Webcamera

I fixed and cleaned a reverse engineered driver. One can obtain a copy from git repo (git). About userspace, applications such as camstream (in Fedora 7 repository) or ekiga are working with it (you need to enable V4L1 compatible layer to enable V4L1 support).

Fingerprint reader

AFAIK it's not supported. When using aes2501 driver, some data is coming, but it seems to be defunct. Maybe, when I won't be busy, I'll try to intercept communication through usbmon and qemu :).
Update: I have the specs for similar device. Maybe I'll take a look sometimes.

ExpressCard

Works fine with my mini-PCI express Atheros wireless card with mini-PCI-E to ExpressCard conversion board.

Virtualization

T5600 processor has vmx flag, so KVM works, I use kvm-18 with its modules. Configured and executed this way:

./configure --qemu-cc=gcc --disable-gcc-check
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda win.img -soundhw es1370 -usb

VMware-server 1 is no problem too. I had problems with setting up of version 2 though – should be fixed later.

Copyleft (c) 2008-2010 Jiri Slaby