Here you can find information on how to install and run Gentoo on an Asus W1000N. A W1N forum, and a gallery with some pictures and clips from my W1000N are also available.
08/02/2004
Bernjuer found a resolution for the sound problem, yeeha!
07/04/2004
New
BIOS version 0203A released by ASUS. No changes recognizable.
06/21/2004
More info on sound problem added
ASUS W1N Linux Sound Fix Petition added
06/14/2004
SpeedStep support added
06/08/2004
News on ndiswrapper added
05/24/2004
Added notes on modem and IrDA
Documentation on WXGA framebuffer console added
05/19/2004
I've written a detailed review of the
W1N. Check it out!
05/18/2004
Notes on Synaptics Touchpad added
gtk+ seems to have problems with -msse2 too, so I decided to remove
it from my CFLAGS
05/16/2004
Documentation on WLAN added
Notes on cardreader, PCMCIA
and firewire added
05/13/2004
Recompiling kdelibs without -msse2 did the trick for me. I will put it back
into my CFLAGS, as this seems to be an isolated incident.
05/13/2004
My CFLAGS seem to be too aggressive, because the KDE file browser does not
work. I found a Thread on the Gentoo forums that suggests to turn off -msse2.
05/12/2004
This is the first edition of this page. Nothing much here, yet.
This is the lspci output (on a 2.6.5 kernel)
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 21) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 21) 0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BAM/CAM PCI Bridge (rev 83) 0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4) Ultra ATA Storage Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB (ICH4) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03) 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10] 0000:02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter (rev 13) 0000:02:01.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac) 0000:02:01.1 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac) 0000:02:01.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04) 0000:02:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)
You can view the whole output of "lspci -v" here.
I have a W1726N with a 1,5GHz Pentium-M CPU, the "smallest" model from ASUS' W1 series. This is the output of "cat /proc/cpuinfo"
processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 9 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1500MHz stepping : 5 cpu MHz : 1495.731 cache size : 1024 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm pbe tm2 est bogomips : 2949.12
You can find the complete output of "lshw" here. As you can see my W1N doesn't have a TV-tuner, so it also lacks the remote control and the small display on the front. If you have information on that, feel free to share it using my forum.
I tried booting the Notebook with Knoppix 3.4, using the 2.6.5 Kernel, it hung first, so I booted it with deactivated SCSI support using knoppix26 noscsi.
Knoppix booted fine, but didn't load the module for my network card. After a modprobe sk98lin and a reconfiguration of /etc/network/interfaces, I was able to activate the card with a "ifup eth0".
The drive was formatted with 3 partitions, one 2GB recovery-partition and two 30GB FAT32 partitions. I decided to start from scratch and recreated my partition table witch cfdisk.
I chose to start with a stage2 tarball and went for the one with pentium3-support, because a Pentium M is closer to a Pentium III then to a Pentium IV.
For the same reason I chose to use -march=pentium3. I found some useful information in several threads on the Gentoo Forums. Based on that, my CFLAGS are
CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -pipe -frename-registers -fomit-frame-pointer \
-fforce-addr -s -falign-functions=64 -fprefetch-loop-arrays"
BEWARE: I don't recommend using -msse2, because it causes problems with kdelibs-3.2.2 and gtk+
My personal USE-flags are:
USE="acpi alsa artswrappersuid dvd java mmx ooo-kde qtmt radeon samba sse \
usb -crypt -gnome cdr divx4linux encode fbcon -gtk imap jpeg gif \
kde lirc truetype xvid mpeg msn ncurses pcmcia qt quicktime tiff \
xfs wifi fam"
My current kernel .config for gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.5-r1 can be found here.
I went for the new xorg ebuild, which was masked, so I had to build it with
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge xorg-x11
Some applications think, they need the original xfree, but a short emerge
inject x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r5 should take care of that.
I also installed the version 3.7.6 of ati-drivers (3.9.0 causes problems when switching from X to console) using
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge =media-video/ati-drivers-3.7.6-r1 =media-video/ati-drivers-3.7.6After you installed qt, you can also ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge ati-drivers-extra to get some additional tools. I used /opt/ati/bin/fglrxinfo to create a xorg.conf and got a working modline for 1280x800@60Hz from Mike Hardy's website. You can find my xorg.conf here.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons"
EndSection
The sound card works with the ALSA driver snd_intel8x0, but you need a small workaround.
I simply compiled in my kernel with ALSA-Support for snd-intel8x0 and emerged alsa-lib and alsa-utils.
Afterwards I modified /etc/modules.d/alsa to have alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0 in the ALSA portion. Then I ran update-modules and rc-update add alsasound default.
As forum user bernjuer has found here you have to manually set a few registers to activate the internal speakers. CONFIG_SND_DEBUG=y
CONFIG_SND_DEBUG_MEMORY=y
CONFIG_SND_DEBUG_DETECT=y
This way you can change alsa registers manually: echo -n "26 000F" > /proc/asound/card0/codec97#0/ac97#0-0+regs
echo -n "36 0000" > /proc/asound/card0/codec97#0/ac97#0-0+regs
echo -n "64 7110" > /proc/asound/card0/codec97#0/ac97#0-0+regs
Simply add the above lines to /etc/conf.d/local.start to make the changes
automatically at every boot.
The built-in sound chip (C-Media CMI9739) doesn't have a PCM volume control, so you can't control the volume with alsamixer or kmix.
The guys at ALSA rejected a patch that added a software mixer for this driver, so right now I simply use the aRts daemon. XMMS supports aRts with the aRts output plugin. Mplayer has its own volume control, use it with
gmplayer -monitoraspect 16:10 -ao alsa -af volume movie.avior change the settings in /etc/mplayer.conf (add af=volume).
The notebooks of ASUS W1000 Series incorporate the new Intel Centrino WLAN Module with 802.11g standard (54MBit/s). As of now there is no native linux driver for the 2200BG. There is a non-functional test module developed by the ipw2200 project, which looks quite promising.
I went for the next best thing (GPL-wise) and installed ndiswrapper, a wrapper for Windows-drivers, which (almost) works with a little trick. Here is what I did:
The new Centrino 802.11BG-chip is claimed to be supported by the most recent ndiswrapper 0.7, but there is no ebuild for it, yet. There is also a problem with notebooks which can't switch off the WLAN card with a hardware-button. Pre-version 0.8-rc2 works with a tiny patch. If you don't apply this patch you will get this error:
ndiswrapper version 0.8-rc2 loaded ndiswrapper adding w22n51.sys wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:0f:15:12:ac:c2 using driver w22n51.sys wlan0: getting configuration failed (C0000001)
As Maurits found out in this
thread you have to comment out doreset(handle); in the file
driver/wrapper.c. Thank you for pointing this out to me, Maurits and
Martin.
I didn't want to create an ebuild, so I followed the directions in the
INSTALL file to build the driver with make install.
I copied all files from my Windows driver's PROW2200/WINXP/ directory to /usr/lib/hotplug/drivers/ and did a ndiswrapper -i /usr/lib/hotplug/drivers/w22n51.INF. After that I had to change/create some configuration files:
#/etc/modules.d/ndiswrapper
alias wlan0 ndiswrapper
install ndiswrapper /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ndiswrapper && { loadndisdriver /etc/ndiswrapper/w22n51 ; }
I copied /etc/init.d/net.eth0 to /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 and added a few lines:
#/etc/init.d/net.wlan0
iface_start() {
local IFACE=${1} i x
checkconfig || return 1
# Start WLAN specific stuff added by FK
/bin/echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/wled
modprobe ${IFACE}
wait
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ${IFACE} mode Managed
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ${IFACE} key open XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
/usr/sbin/iwconfig ${IFACE} essid WhatEverIsYourSSID
# End WLAN
if [[ ${ifconfig_IFACE} != dhcp ]]; then
After a update-modules and a /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start
everything looked fine, but then this error after loading the ndiswrapper
module caught my eye: ndiswrapper version 0.8-rc2 loaded ndiswrapper adding w22n51.sys wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:0f:15:12:ac:c2 using driver w22n51.sys Cannot add duplicate driver
I found out that the card got slower and slower after a few transferred MB and eventually got unusable until I rebooted.
UPDATE: If you use the CVS-version of ndiswrapper the connection seems stable. You can get the CVS-version by doing a
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/ndiswrapper login (if asked for a password simply press enter) cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/ndiswrapper co ndiswrapper
Another option is Linuxant's commercial DriverLoader, which
works fine (just follow the documentation on their site).
Works fine with yenta_socket.
Works fine with ieee1394, ohci1394 and sbp2.
The build-in CardReader seems to be attached to the PCMCIA-Bus. It is called RICOH Bay2Controller and according to this site there is no linux-driver for it.
FEATURES="-sandbox" ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge slmodemI couldn't get it to work yet, because the insmod command hangs. As I don't need the modem I won't invest too much time in getting it to work.
Simply enable these settings in your kernel-config:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics support --->
[*] Support for frame buffer devices
[ ] VESA VGA graphics support
<*> ATI Radeon display support
[*] DDC/I2C for ATI Radeon support (NEW)
and add this to your append-line in
lilo.conf: video=radeonfb:accel,mtrr
BTW: Bootsplash only works with VESA-FB, so you have to choose between a 1280x800 resolution or a background image for your console.
This should work with irtty-sir.
To use the Centrino SpeedStep feature you have to enable these settings in your kernel-config:
Power management options (ACPI, APM) --->
CPU Frequency scaling --->
[*] CPU Frequency scaling
<*> 'powersave' governor
<*> 'userspace' governor for userspace frequency scaling
<*> CPU frequency table helpers
<*> Intel Enhanced SpeedStep
A demon is needed to automatically switch the CPU frequency. I chose cpudyn. Since version 0.99.0 the tool has support for the ASUS specific LEDs (mail-led for powersafe, wlan-led for full speed). Emerge cpudyn with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge cpudyn. Afterwards add this to /etc/conf.d/cpudyn:
# # Include ASUS support. # ASUS=yes
And add this to /etc/init.d/cpudyn (inside the start() function):
if [ "$ASUS" == "yes" ]; then CPUDYN_OPTS="$CPUDYN_OPTS -asus"; fi
hotkeys, TV-out, CIR, TV-tuner
Please contribute to this page by using my forum, either in English or in German.
created by Frederik Kunz (frederik at linux dot w1n slash forum dot net)
