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    8.04 on Acer 4810t

    Hello all.

    I use a laptop at work in which I travel all over London visiting clients for between 90 & 120 mins. Last year I bought an eeepc 1000H because of the battery life. I wanted to keep things simple, so I stuck with the Xandros install which only runs kde 3.4.2 and there seems to be no intention of ever upgrading it. I know I could have used any one of many remixes, but I've got bored of spending days trying different distros and want a kde machine that works (the customisability of kde makes my work life much easier).

    Anyway, I discovered that the atom 1.6ghz is very slow and has finally driven me around the bend enough for me to invest in an Acer 4810t dual core, mainly because of its weight and battery life.

    I thought I'd document the my experiences here.

    1st off I checked the machine and was pleasantly happy at how quickly Vista annoyed me with all it's pop up windows and warnings. I then used GParted to partition the disk (320Gb) so that there was a partition for a Swap too.

    I had an old 8.04 cd which I'd burn when it first came out, and used that. The install went fine, except that on first boot it the video drivers were wrong, and though X was starting, I couldn't make out what was going on on the screen. Still being the working week, I went to bed.

    By the end of the next day I had resolved not to fiddle an just try 9.04 instead. It all went very smoothly and I was impressed with 4.2, thought the ethernet port failed to work (I used wireless) which I though was disappointing, and neither the sound or brightness worked thought they appeared to be working on the keyboard. Nothing I couldn't fix at the weekend.

    So I started to customize it, get my head around kde4 and figured that it was all going rather well.

    Then of course it happened, and this always happens at least once on a clean install for me. I shut down the machine, and on reboot got

    Code:
    kstartupconfig4 does not exist or failed. The error code is 3
    and a frozen screen when I did manage to load X.

    I cast around for three or four hours on this, trying different solutions but nothing came up. As I said above, this machine is for work, so I want something I can trust and that is really stable. 3.5.10 is that, so in the end I burnt a new 8.04 (8.04.2) which had a much better installer and here I am, writing on the machine now. I used GParted again, and this time put the /home directory in a different partition.

    It is perfectly usable and seems very stable. The ethernet port worked out of the box and I'm going to document my progress.

    At present the functions keys for volume and brightness are working on screen, but they are doing nothing. So my first job is to find out how to get them working.

    If anyone can help, that would be great, I'll document the answers here when I find them.
    Jim Hitch<br />English Language Services Limited<br />http://www.englishlanguageservices.co.uk

    #2
    Re: 8.04 on Acer 4810t

    Some days later now, after dithering once more between 9.04 & 8.04, but have stuck with the latter. The upgrade system has taken me through to 8.04.3 - and the sound does work, I think Kmix had the setting weird to start with.

    My main concern at this point is how to get the brightness settings usable, any tips appreciated.

    Jim
    Jim Hitch<br />English Language Services Limited<br />http://www.englishlanguageservices.co.uk

    Comment


      #3
      Re: 8.04 on Acer 4810t

      Thank you for documenting your findings Jim. I am not sure this will help too much, but around 8.04, for the eeepc 701, there were some scripts circulating on the web to adjust volume, screen brightness and such from the hot buttons (the names are always OSD-something, for on-screen-display).

      In 9.04, in System Settings -> Power Saving you can set the OS to dim the display under certain conditions (5 minutes idle, etc). The hot keys on my eeepc 701 work out of the box (only in 9.04). Have you tried that in your acer?

      Comment


        #4
        Re: 8.04 on Acer 4810t

        Originally posted by lmilano
        Thank you for documenting your findings Jim. I am not sure this will help too much, but around 8.04, for the eeepc 701, there were some scripts circulating on the web to adjust volume, screen brightness and such from the hot buttons (the names are always OSD-something, for on-screen-display).

        In 9.04, in System Settings -> Power Saving you can set the OS to dim the display under certain conditions (5 minutes idle, etc). The hot keys on my eeepc 701 work out of the box (only in 9.04). Have you tried that in your acer?
        Thanks for getting back to me. Funnily enough, I have bought the acer to replace an eeepc 1000H, it's too slow for documents and email.

        8.04 has similar power settings, and when unplugged the system tells me that the brightness has been dimmed, but there is no actual change. I have posted more in another section;

        http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106008.0

        As for the scripts... I'll see if I can find any.

        Cheers
        Jim Hitch<br />English Language Services Limited<br />http://www.englishlanguageservices.co.uk

        Comment


          #5
          Re: 8.04 on Acer 4810t

          Trying to get the CD/DVD drive to work now.

          At present it doesn't work unless you put a disk in at boot time. If I subsequently remove the disk and then replace it, machine no longer finds it.

          I'm trying to sort the problem here

          http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3106071.0

          Will post success here if & when.
          Jim Hitch<br />English Language Services Limited<br />http://www.englishlanguageservices.co.uk

          Comment

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