Revision as of 14:50, 6 January 2015

Experiments

This page keeps track of what I've been doing on getting my laptop to work. It's not an installation guide.

Dual-boot problems

After messing around a bit, I just decided that it just wasn't worth the effort and I went with a Linux-only install. This has the added advantage of freeing up some more disk-space (256Gb is not *that* much).

See here: Acer Aspire VN7-591G USB boot + SSD question

Just a heads up. I found that this laptop (in UEFI mode) is one that will only boot EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi.
You can install a Linux EFI img and change the boot order with something like 'efibootmgr' and it will switch the boot
order back to Windows first on reboot. You can hit F-12 at boot and then select your Linux image but that's a pain.
I ended up copying Window's bootmgfw.efi to EFI/Microsoft/bootmgfw.efi and installing rEFInd as bootmgfw.efi as described here.

I made a backup of the Windows restore partition to a USB flash drive that I'll keep aside just in case. (using the Acer restore utility)

Device info

#lspci -q -nn
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor DRAM Controller [8086:0c04] (rev 06)
00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x16 Controller [8086:0c01] (rev 06)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0416] (rev 06)
00:03.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller [8086:0c0c] (rev 06)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI [8086:8c31] (rev 05)
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:8c3a] (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #2 [8086:8c2d] (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller [8086:8c20] (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #3 [8086:8c14] (rev d5)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #4 [8086:8c16] (rev d5)
00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #1 [8086:8c26] (rev 05)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM86 Express LPC Controller [8086:8c49] (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] [8086:8c03] (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:8c22] (rev 05)
01:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 860M] [10de:1392] (rev a2)
07:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros Killer N1525 Wireless-AC [168c:003e] (rev 20)
08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 0c)

Linux Installation

Mint 17.1

It's time to try out a new Linux distribution. I always tend to end up with Debian, my last excursion being Ubuntu until they started with their Unity BS. For now, I'll install Linux Mint. If I don't like it, I can always change.

Booting from USB

I just downloaded the iso and copied the file to the stick:

dd bs=4M if=linuxmint-17.1-kde-64bit-rc.iso of=/dev/sdX

Then I changed the Boot options on the portable (F2 at boot time) to Legacy mode. Guided install - full disk. Bye bye, windows.

Touchpad

See: touch-pad not detected on Acer Aspire VN7-591g

This is a bit annoying: in the live session, you can't click on the install icon. This is circumvented by pressing the context menu key on the keyboard, press 'n' to select "Run...", then start typing "install" and the installation program should be in the suggestion list.

After upgrading to kernel 3.16 the Touchpad works, but right-clicking is not recognized. I'll look into this further (information is provided in the link above), but meanwhile in the KDE settings I selected a two-finger click to be interpreted as a right-click.

Network

Wifi not recognized?

SSD wear prevention

• Added noatime to /etc/fstab root partition options

UUID=70829450-5b80-414a-8a8d-e7c58c2512c3 /               ext4    noatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1

NVidia

WIP.

• NVidia drivers in Mint 17.1 do not support the 860M
• There is now some support for dual gfx cards, through bumblebee.

Some of the fiddling so far ( Most of the time I have no clue what I'm doing ;-) ):

apt-get install linux-headers-3.16.0-28
apt-get install linux-headers-3.16.0-28-generic
cd /home/hans/Downloads/
chmod 755 NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.22.run 
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.22.run 
/etc/init.d/mdm stop
apt-get install bumblebee-nvidia
apt-cache show primus
apt-get install bumblebee-nvidia primus
/etc/init.d/mdm start
/etc/init.d/mdm stop
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.22.run 
nvidia-xconfig 
/etc/init.d/mdm start
vi /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia 
vi /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf 
updatedb
locate nvidia
vi /etc/bumblebee/bumblebee.conf 
/etc/init.d/mdm start

Trying to undo the changes:

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.22.run --uninstall
apt-get remove --purge bumblebee-nvidia primus
apt-get autoremove

Next, trying xorg-edgers ppa

add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-346 nvidia-settings

(it removed nvidia-304 which was installed too, apparently). After a reboot, I ran glxinfo to check if the NVIDIA driver was being used, but no. Then I read I needed to do an upgrade.

apt-get upgrade
apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia primus

After installing bumblebee, I can use both cards.

glxinfo
optirun glxinfo

The first command shows an Intel graphics card is being used, the second command shows that the NVIDIA card is used.

Links

• NVIDIA (Arch docs)
• NVidia Optimus (Arch docs)
• Bumblebee troubleshooting
• Bumblebee on ubuntu
• NVidia drivers on Ubuntu/Mint
• Ubuntu 14.04: Hybrid Graphics
• Installing and Configuring Bumblebee on Optimus-designed laptops

GnuRadio

Installation

Quite easy using pybombs.

apt-get install git
git clone git://github.com/pybombs/pybombs
cd pybombs
./pybombs install gnuradio

Installing Fosphor

It requires OpenCL. Following the install instructions:

apt-get install cmake xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

If you execute the next step, it will install the 331 version of the driver. Therefore, I explicitely added the nvidia-opencl-icd-346 package first

apt-get install nvidia-opencl-icd-346

If I then try the next step:

apt-get install nvidia-opencl-dev opencl-headers