SuSe10.0 on ASUS A6750KLH A6000 series.

I bought the computer in December 2005 with the hardware below.

Component	Description	State
CPU	AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology, 1MB L2 cache, MT-30 1600 GHz. Frequency scaling working with Linux.	OK
Chipset	SiS M760GX + SiS 964L.	OK
RAM	1 x 512 MB DDR-333 SO-DIMM (expandable to 2 GB).	OK
HDD Hitachi	IC25N060ATMR04-0 60GB 4200RPM ATA-6.	OK
DVD-R(W)	Matshita UJ841S DVD-Super-Multi Double Layer. Does not work with some commercial DVD, see note below.	OK
Display	SVGA LCD TFT 15.4" WXGA 1280x800.	OK
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce Go 6200 with Turbo Cache 256 MB. Tested with bouth XOrg and NVidia driver.	OK
S-Video		Not tested
Sound	Integrated [SiS] AC'97 Audio Controller.	OK
USB	4 x USB-2 SiS integrated controler.	OK
Firewire	Ricoh R5C552 (IEEE1394a/IEEE1394b). Tetsted with a camcorder from Canon.	OK
LAN	RTL-8139 (10/100Mbps) from Realtek.	OK
WLAN	BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g from Broadcom. Use ndiswrapper and Windows driver. The chip does not support 802.11a/b. Windows driver can be downloaded from here.	OK
Modem	Integrated [SiS] AC'97 Modem Controller 56K V90. See AC '97 Modem Driver Project. It looks like that the right driver is snd_intel8x0m, and the modem could be used together with the slmodemd application from Smart Link	Not tested
TochPad		OK
ACPI	The ACPI modules load and successfully report the remaining battery, etc. See note below about LEDs and Hotkeys.	Partly OK.
PCMCIA	Ricoh RL5c476 II (The kernel module is yenta_socket).	Not tested
Flash Media Reader	R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro from (Ricoh Co Ltd.) I did not find any driver for it, but maybe it would work with the SDHCI controler there is under work. See SDHCI wiki.	No driver
WebCam	USB2.0 Camera M5602 from ALi Corp. Doesn’t work, since there’s no driver available (ALI do not want to hand out the datasheets for it) see: ALi M5603C Product Overview . A driver project is on its way see: the WIKI Page and Ali m560x Linux Driver.	No driver
IrDAs	SMC 217 (on /dev/ttyS1)	OK

Windows XP

The computer comes with Windows XP Home Edition installed and two CDs, there are a kind of ghost of the actual instalation. This can give problems if you install Linux and want to re-install Windows, as the Windows boot loader is over written with Grub or Lillo. So a good idea is to make a backup of your boot sector of the disk before instaling Linux. Boot the computer from a Linux live disk such as Knoppix open a command prompt and write sudo dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=512 of=win-boot.bin count=1 then copy the file win-boot.bin to an other media. You are now ready to install Linux and can recover you Windows instalation as it was when you bought the computer.

Installing SuSE 10.0 x86_64

As the computer comes with a 64 bit processor, I want it to use a 64 bit operation system (OS). I have used SuSE a lot lately and for that reason it was natural to choose this OS.
I downloaded the DVD ISO image and burned the SuSE DVD. The first time I tried to install the OS, the computer stopped while booting using battery power, inserting a USB device solved the problem. This is also a problem when the instalation was finished and the only way to stop the computer hanging while booting on battery power is to have a USB device connected. It looks like it is a kernel bug and should be fixable by using the modified DSDT from Kevin Vacit, by following two howtos: Eric Piel's initrd patch or Philipp Matthias Hahn's wiki page. I have not tried this jet.
As SuSE's xine do not load libdvdcss and as such, not permit me to watch commercial DVDs. I uninstalled all rpms there are used by xine, including kaffeine. Then I added the link http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.0/ as a new install media in YaST and installed the following packs:

libxine1-1.1.1-0.pm.2.x86_64

kaffeine-0.7.1-3.pm.0.x86_64

xine-ui-0.99.4-5.pm.1.x86_64

libdvdread-0.9.4-149.pm.0.x86_64

I downloaded the libdvdcss-1.2.9-1.src.rpm from http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/rpm/ and installed it the following way:

rpmbuild --rebuild --target=x86_64 libdvdcss-2.2.9-1

rpm -i /usr/src/packages/RPMS/x86_64/libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.x86_64.rpm

I still have some problems with watching some DVD because of the firmware in the DVD-drive (see below).

Wireless LAN

The computer comes with the BCM4318 (AirForce One 54g) chip from Broadcom, there is not supported by the Linux kernel, because Broadcom has never released data for this chip, for this reason i use the ndiswrapper with a Windows XP driver. It seems, that the 64-bit Windows driver only support 802.11g and not 802.11a/b networks. The OS has no problems to see a 802.11g network but I can not see any signal in a 802.11a/b network. I got the Windows driver from Acer's suport ftp.
To install the driver do:

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf (Installing Windows INF driver in ndiswrapper)

ndiswrapper -l (See driver installed)

ndiswrapper -m (Write configuration for modprobe)

modprobe ndiswrapper (Load driver)

dmesg | tail -n 6 (gives a description of your wireless lan interface)

Then used YaST to setup the device.
You can use the iwlist wlan0 scan command to scan the aria for networks and the iwconfig command together with ifconfig, to setup the interface manually. I use wlassistant to control the WLAN and kdesu wlassistant to run it.
The bcm43xx project is making a comunity driver for the Broadcom chip.

Graphic card

The computer comes with the GeForce Go 6200 Turbo Cache chip from Nvidia. The chip works without any problem with the XOrg driver there comes with SuSE. I downloaded the Linux x86_64 Nvidia driver from Nvidia's home site, for better performance, and it installs and functions.
The Turbo Cache means that the chip can use the system ram as an extention to it's graphic ram, in a very efficiently way. The 256 MB video ram that the specifications promise is, as fare I understand, divided in 128 MB of graphic ram on the chip and a possibility, to dynamically allocate up to other 128 MB of system ram.
Using the nvidia-settings program from Nvidia, shows 64 MB of video ram, and is, after my opinion, a bit confusing. I belive, that means, that the chip is using 64 MB of system ram in that moment, but I am not sure about that, as top shows me that I have 508716K of total memory available on the system. Under Windows the Nvidia settings shows 256 MB video ram, what that means is not so clear to.

The Sound Card

The SuSE installation procedure detected the sound chipset without any problems, and YaST now give me the following setup:

Driver: snd-intel8x0

AC'97 code clock (0 = auto-detect): ac97_clock

AC'97 workaround for strange hardware: ac97_quirk

Enable work-around for buggy interupts on some motherboards: buggy_irq

The DVD-R(W) drive

This device has given me some problems, as the firmware protect commercial CSS incoded DVDs rather good. It looks like the drive protect DVDs with the Sony ARccOs copy protection system. These DVDs can be watched on other computers with SuSE installed, with the above changes, but not on the drive installed on ASUS A6750KLH.
In the start the libdvdcss could not decode any commercial DVD at all, this was solved by changing the region code using regionset. I am waiting for some new firmware comes from The Firmware Page for the Matshita UJ841S drive or I find some other solution.
If you want to copy DVDs, it looks like that the Windows programs DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter integrate with Wine without any problems, there is an article about it here. You should also be able to use dvdbackup

LEDs and Hotkeys

The LEDs, in front of the computer, and the instant hotkeys, at the top right, are controlled by the asus_acpi module, that SuSE loads automatically, and acpid. A simple echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/mled will turn on the blue mail LED and echo 0 > /proc/acpi/asus/mled will turn it off.
The Hotkeys do not function. When I look in the /var/log/acpid file, I can see that the keys has different values each time they are used. The reason for this could be that the asus_acpi module does not support the A6K models. A look in /proc/acpi/asus/info shows that the module see my computer as a M2E model!
I found the keycodes for the multi media keys in front of the computer with xev to the following values:

back one track: 144

forward one track: 153

stop: 164

play/pause: 162

Use xmodmap to map thise keyes to the values for your multimedia player.
The CD Power key is controled by acpid and has the same problems as the hotkeys above.

Infrared Data Transmission

The IRDA function witout any problems. You can set it up trough the YaSt control centre, ifconfig should show you a new interface irda0. irdadump reports 'hint=0400 [ Computer ] (25)'.
One of the following commands do also work: 'chkconfig irda on' '/etc/init.d/irda start' 'irattach /dev/ttyS1 -s' I downloaded the latest version of OpenOBEX, as the version there comes with SuSE 10.0 did not function, and tested the IRDA with a Sony Ericsson K700I:

obexftp -i -l list the phone root directory.

obexftp -i -c / -l <dir> list the content of a single directory.

obexftp -i -g <dir>/<file> download a file from the phone.

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Henrik Baastrup (c) Dec-2005 (last changed 20/4-2006)
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