Today did an installation of Ubuntu 8.04 on an Acer Aspire 3680, which up until this point was used as a Windows machine.

Turns out this model too has the Atheros AR5007EG (AR242x ) installed.
The same as the Aspire 5315.

In previous post i had described a fix for this card using ndiswrapper.
The same instructions are valid this time too.

Here’s the link : /hardy-on-acer-aspire-5315/

Sometimes laptops while still on factory settings have a default password that protects the BIOS and at times even the booting of the machine itself.

If ever in this situation you can send the hardware in one of the maintenance labs , and they will very nicely sort it out for you. The problem is that this costs 75-100 euros + time.

The protection actually is created by a hardware switch ( otherwise they could just tell you the pass right ).

Not too long ago i had to do something of than nature with and acer Aspire 1360.
Took a few pics in the process too , to document it better.

Step 1: On the left and on the right hand side of the laptop we have to remove two little plastic covers

which underneath , hide a screw each.

Step 2 : Unscrew both of them.

Step 3 : Push the LCD back. The Middle panel ( power button, wifi, etc ) needs to be carefully lifted on both sides.

Step 4 : the keyboard is next. For this you have to be even more careful

Step 5 : Now , underneath the keyboard we find the switches we were looking for.

Step 6 : You will find 4 horizontal switches. The 1st one says ‘Password Check’ and the 2nd one is for the Boot Block.

Flip the switch you need to, close, and reboot.

Seems it has been more than a year since the last time i posted.
Ah well, here we go back at it.

These last few days we picked up a few Acer Aspire 5315 from PCCity.
Turns out these had Linpus 9.4 preinstalled. Not being familiar with this distro i politely asked someone from the staff if he knew what distro did this one fork from.

The answers went from Debian (no-no), to Slackware , to Suse.
Actually it turns out it’s Fedora.

Brought them back to the office. The laptops are really nice . Solid looking yet elegant.
Fired up the system to see what this Linpus thing is all about.

KDE based environment. Little too flashy too.
After messing around with it for a bit and figuring out that the Wifi-Radar application (python),
fails if no networks are found, and a few other tricks like this one, decided to start installing software.

The pieces of software i was interested in these boxes having, were aMsn and Skype, with video and audio support.

aMsn was preinstalled and worked fine. The troubles started when attempting to sort out skype.
First of all, i had forgotten what a b*itch it is to fullfill dependencies during rpm installs on non Debian-based systems.

I guess i just taught myself lazy.

After finding everything i needed and installing it with no errors or complications, when trying to run Skype, fails with the following message:

process 3066: D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such file or directory
See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.


Ran a few patches, but no luck-
This was the wake up call. Dug through my desk and gladly found a 32-bit copy of Ubuntu 8.04
(i use 64bits on all my stations so that version is hard for me to find. Unless i want to sit and download it ).

The installation went through with no problems at all.
The system booted up and the 1st thing i noticed was the usage of restricted drivers for the Atheros wifi card.
On top of this, the card is not recognized by the Network Manager at all.

Ah well, the madwifi drivers see to not do either so ndiswrapper is on call:

sid@dev:~$ sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9


And here’s the Winxp driver for the card:
http://www.mediafire.com/?emektlygdif

Vista on will not work. In that package both 32 and 64 bits are included.
Unzipped the file and found the driver

sudo ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf


Few lines will appear on the screen:
forcing parameter MapRegisters from 256 to 64.
Ignore it, when it’s done it will stop by itself.

Disable the restricted driver from the manager. Add ‘ndiswrapper’ (no quotes) at the end of /etc/modules to run at start up.
Blacklist the current driver :

echo "blacklist ath_pci" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Reboot. After that Network Manager with have the card recognized, and working properly.