I’ve noticed a lot of searches on xrandr in my blog stats and have been wondering what the problem is. Xrandr is a command line tool for enabling or disabling multiple display ports on your system as well as setting display resolution and even rotation. You would use it, for […]
aspire
I was reading various web sites today when I came across an article on ComputerWorld discussion the 5 best features of Linux 2.6.28. On of these items is GEM, the Graphics Execution Manager. This is a new architecture of sorts that allows for better X performance (in a nutshell). Why […]
F10 intel driver: a few more tidbits
6 Over the holidays I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10 (previously I had only upgraded my MythTV server). The upgrade went fairly smoothly following the information from my previous post on upgrading a MythTV server to F10. However, my laptop supports dual monitors. Of course, that didn’t work out of […]
Fedora 10 issues with intel driver and multihead
I’ve finally figured out how to get my external monitor working with my Acer Aspire 1691WLMi laptop in side-by-side mode. The trick is to use the Virtual option with a large enough x dimension. Most of the documentation I’ve found up till now has stated that making Virtual larger than […]
XRandr and Intel i915
My sister needed me to pull some pictures off her digital camera so we could place an ad in our parents home paper for their 50th wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the USB cable for the camera. However, the camera had an SD card. And my Acer Aspire 1691WLMi […]
Getting the Acer Aspire 1691 SD slot working under Fedora ...
After about 1 1/2 years on FC2, I finally upgraded my Acer Aspire 1690 laptop. If you read my earlier posts on installing FC2 then you know it wasn't a straight forward configuration to get everything working. I'm pleased to say that is no longer the case. FC5 covers essentially […]
Acer Aspire 1690: FC2 -> FC5 upgrade
Someone wrote to me a while back after I got my Aspire working with Linux to ask which button on the front panel to push to get wifi working. At the time I didn’t realize I had to press that button. Well, after a few reboots to drag the laptop […]
Acer Aspire redux: the wifi magic button
After all that work with my synaptics pad I finally decided to – essentially – disable it. I bought a $20 notebook optical USB mouse and it works fine. So now, after the system comes up, I just issue synclient FingerHigh=320 and plug in the USB mouse. So why did […]
The last thing about my Aspire 1690
My CDRW/DVD RW won’t play DVDs. It handles CDs fine, but DVD playing doesn’t work. Checking the logs I found the message: Jun 11 22:58:23 kepler kernel: ATAPI device hdb: Jun 11 22:58:23 kepler kernel: Error: Illegal request — (Sense key=0x05) Jun 11 22:58:23 kepler kernel: Media region code is […]
Acer Aspire 1690 – changing region code for DVD-RW
I upgraded FC3 and got a new kernel: 2.6.11-1.27. This kernel supports the ipw2200 wireless correctly, although you may still need to get the updated acerhk module to enable the wireless after you power off and then back on. Once the wireless hardware is enabled, I think it stays enabled […]
Acer Aspire updates
After I got X running again late last night, I didn’t look too deeply at how everything else was working. One thing that stopped working was the Synaptics pad. Before X died (and was resurrected) the Synaptics driver was loading and working fine. But that was with my own kernel, […]
ACPI update and Synaptics changes
The i915 driver snapshot from freedesktop.org fixed my problems with the video on my Acer Aspire 1690. It even allows the graphical boot (aka rhgb) to function again. But I still can’t use the DVD player. I still get lots of errors related to accessing hdb in /var/log/messages. I’ll have […]