A new laptop with Debian 8 with KDE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just bought the latest from ACER an
ACER Aspire E15 E5-573-74BW
Nice laptop. Nice large screen, keyboard with num block, touchpad. Intel i7 processor and 8 GB of RAM.
1 TB HDD.
PREPARATION TO INSTALL LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It took longest to figure out how to enable booting into the BIOS on the Window 8.1 installation.
Had to work through the windows side bar and settings. Had to try several times to get into the advanced start settings. Finally Win 8 decided to give in and let me change the setting in order to be able to access the BIOS on startup. Used F2 during boot.
First thing to do is disable advanced security and UEFI boot. (I disable this option altogether, well aware of what I'm doing.) This brings the BIOS back to a basic BIOS.
I found out later that the tochpad would work fine in KDE when the advanced is turned to basic in the BIOS. So the next time I would change that option at the same time once I'm in the BIOS.
INSTALLATION OF LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once I got that figured I installed Debian 8 from CD-ROM by booting into the normal installer.
Worked like a charm. When at the HDD partitioning I have deleted the largest partition, then installed the system into this partition using an automated setup and all into one partition.
Then changed the sources.list to include contrib and non-free and at the same time uncomenting the CD-ROM entry from the setup. (As the CD-ROM is normally later not available this gets rid of the nuisance warnings that the source blabla CD-ROM blabla ist not accessible.)
Then installed my usual set of software. See other blog post about software I normally install.
WHAT IS WORKING - WHAT IS NOT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Working out of the box:
Well - lets write up what did NOT WORK out of the box and the fixes - it's way shorter:
1. Touchpad (To fix the non working touchpad in KDE (I assume also other GUI) enter the BIOS and place the Touchpad into "BASIC") Then it works like a charm.
SOLVED
2. WiFi (This is the only downside - The Aceros driver for that chipset is not yet available SEP 2015, still no solution OCT 2015)
PENDING - WORKAROUND AVAILABLE (see below)
3. Webcam - Status unknown not yet tested
UNKNOWN
4. Power settings - The general profile options work fine. The finer tunings are partially not supported (HDD spin-down, etc.) I'll have to dig into that but simply have no time for that.
PENDING
5. Screen - Acts up randomly in so far as that with the power safe features it dims but sometimes cannot be woken again and stays dim. To brighten up the screen again I can use "Fn" + "F6".
SOLVED
WORKAROUNDS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installing a workaround for the wifi proves difficult at best, as many chipsets which were previously working have undergone letter revisions (e.g. from version D to E) and are not currently supported. That means if you buy today, you most of the time have a too recent hardware.
I have tried a D-Link DWA-171 but the chipset had revision E1 which is not yet supported.
Then changed to a different D-Link device.
D-LINK DWA-140 rev. D2 which is an USB wireless connector.
The respective information is:
output
Device ID 2001:3c20 D-Link Corp.
output:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2001:3c20 D-Link Corp.
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x2001 D-Link Corp.
idProduct 0x3c20
bcdDevice 1.01
iManufacturer 1 Ralink
iProduct 2 802.11 n WLAN
iSerial 3 1.0
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
First make sure that "non-free" is enabled in sources.list.
You will need to edit the file and add non-free to the respective lines.
Look it up on the internet using the following search words: debian sources.list non-free
run
to include the non-free in the sources
run
this will install all ralink firmware in preparation for the usb stick.
Plug in the USB stick. It should be recognized right away and nearly
immediately show up on the network manager as wireless device.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just bought the latest from ACER an
ACER Aspire E15 E5-573-74BW
Nice laptop. Nice large screen, keyboard with num block, touchpad. Intel i7 processor and 8 GB of RAM.
1 TB HDD.
PREPARATION TO INSTALL LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
It took longest to figure out how to enable booting into the BIOS on the Window 8.1 installation.
Had to work through the windows side bar and settings. Had to try several times to get into the advanced start settings. Finally Win 8 decided to give in and let me change the setting in order to be able to access the BIOS on startup. Used F2 during boot.
First thing to do is disable advanced security and UEFI boot. (I disable this option altogether, well aware of what I'm doing.) This brings the BIOS back to a basic BIOS.
I found out later that the tochpad would work fine in KDE when the advanced is turned to basic in the BIOS. So the next time I would change that option at the same time once I'm in the BIOS.
INSTALLATION OF LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once I got that figured I installed Debian 8 from CD-ROM by booting into the normal installer.
Worked like a charm. When at the HDD partitioning I have deleted the largest partition, then installed the system into this partition using an automated setup and all into one partition.
Then changed the sources.list to include contrib and non-free and at the same time uncomenting the CD-ROM entry from the setup. (As the CD-ROM is normally later not available this gets rid of the nuisance warnings that the source blabla CD-ROM blabla ist not accessible.)
Then installed my usual set of software. See other blog post about software I normally install.
WHAT IS WORKING - WHAT IS NOT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Working out of the box:
Well - lets write up what did NOT WORK out of the box and the fixes - it's way shorter:
1. Touchpad (To fix the non working touchpad in KDE (I assume also other GUI) enter the BIOS and place the Touchpad into "BASIC") Then it works like a charm.
SOLVED
2. WiFi (This is the only downside - The Aceros driver for that chipset is not yet available SEP 2015, still no solution OCT 2015)
PENDING - WORKAROUND AVAILABLE (see below)
3. Webcam - Status unknown not yet tested
UNKNOWN
4. Power settings - The general profile options work fine. The finer tunings are partially not supported (HDD spin-down, etc.) I'll have to dig into that but simply have no time for that.
PENDING
5. Screen - Acts up randomly in so far as that with the power safe features it dims but sometimes cannot be woken again and stays dim. To brighten up the screen again I can use "Fn" + "F6".
SOLVED
WORKAROUNDS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installing a workaround for the wifi proves difficult at best, as many chipsets which were previously working have undergone letter revisions (e.g. from version D to E) and are not currently supported. That means if you buy today, you most of the time have a too recent hardware.
I have tried a D-Link DWA-171 but the chipset had revision E1 which is not yet supported.
Then changed to a different D-Link device.
D-LINK DWA-140 rev. D2 which is an USB wireless connector.
The respective information is:
Code:
lsusb
Device ID 2001:3c20 D-Link Corp.
Code:
lsusb -v
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2001:3c20 D-Link Corp.
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x2001 D-Link Corp.
idProduct 0x3c20
bcdDevice 1.01
iManufacturer 1 Ralink
iProduct 2 802.11 n WLAN
iSerial 3 1.0
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
First make sure that "non-free" is enabled in sources.list.
You will need to edit the file and add non-free to the respective lines.
Look it up on the internet using the following search words: debian sources.list non-free
run
Code:
apt-get update
run
Code:
apt-get install firmware-ralink
Plug in the USB stick. It should be recognized right away and nearly
immediately show up on the network manager as wireless device.