Debian 8.2 "Jessie" on ACER Aspire E1-532
Again a new laptop with Debian 8 with KDE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just bought the latest from ACER:
ACER Aspire E1-532
Nice laptop. Nice large screen, keyboard with num block, touchpad. Intel processor and 4 GB of RAM.
500 GB HDD.
Will be the x-mas gift for a godchild of ours. So first tried to make a decent setup with Windows 8 but to no avail. Took more than 4 hours to have it work the way I want it. No adware, no bloatware, no testversions you have all the buy upgrade now pop-ups. As it is for a child tried to set it up with MS parental control. No worky, either too complicated or too restrictive. My girl tried as well to cope with Win 8 and after running into the automatic updates and restarting a couple of times she got tired and mad at it. The outcome was: "You were right Win 8 is no good - go ahead and install Linux". Here we are:
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. (LEGACY)
After the first install I tried to keep the original setup partitions untouched in order to restore the Win 8 if need be. But the ACER software started to act up and tried to repair the system without letting me boot it to linux. So got angry at the proprietary sh*t and killed all partitions on the HDD to get rid of all this stuff. Then it worked.
INSTALLATION OF LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once I got that figured I installed Debian 8.2 from CD-ROM by booting into the normal installer.
Worked like a charm. When at the HDD partitioning I have used the whole HDD, 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.
www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/error_401-638432/software-under-linux-34697/
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:
Actually everything I have tested so far worked but some needed a tweak.
1. Touchpad tweak
To make it work with tapping instead of using the keys installed the kde-config-touchpad package. Then in settings-system settings pointing devices and keyboards configure as you wish.
2. WiFi
WORKS out of the box.
3. Webcam - Status unknown not yet tested
WORKS out of the box.
4. Power settings - The general profile options work fine.
WORKS out of the box.
5. Screen
WORKS out of the box.
6. Gigabit Ethernet
WORKS with linux-firmware-nonfree
Again a new laptop with Debian 8 with KDE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just bought the latest from ACER:
ACER Aspire E1-532
Nice laptop. Nice large screen, keyboard with num block, touchpad. Intel processor and 4 GB of RAM.
500 GB HDD.
Will be the x-mas gift for a godchild of ours. So first tried to make a decent setup with Windows 8 but to no avail. Took more than 4 hours to have it work the way I want it. No adware, no bloatware, no testversions you have all the buy upgrade now pop-ups. As it is for a child tried to set it up with MS parental control. No worky, either too complicated or too restrictive. My girl tried as well to cope with Win 8 and after running into the automatic updates and restarting a couple of times she got tired and mad at it. The outcome was: "You were right Win 8 is no good - go ahead and install Linux". Here we are:
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. (LEGACY)
After the first install I tried to keep the original setup partitions untouched in order to restore the Win 8 if need be. But the ACER software started to act up and tried to repair the system without letting me boot it to linux. So got angry at the proprietary sh*t and killed all partitions on the HDD to get rid of all this stuff. Then it worked.
INSTALLATION OF LINUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once I got that figured I installed Debian 8.2 from CD-ROM by booting into the normal installer.
Worked like a charm. When at the HDD partitioning I have used the whole HDD, 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.
www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog/error_401-638432/software-under-linux-34697/
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:
Actually everything I have tested so far worked but some needed a tweak.
1. Touchpad tweak
To make it work with tapping instead of using the keys installed the kde-config-touchpad package. Then in settings-system settings pointing devices and keyboards configure as you wish.
2. WiFi
WORKS out of the box.
3. Webcam - Status unknown not yet tested
WORKS out of the box.
4. Power settings - The general profile options work fine.
WORKS out of the box.
5. Screen
WORKS out of the box.
6. Gigabit Ethernet
WORKS with linux-firmware-nonfree