Debian HOW-TO : Etch on Asus Z63A

From Wizah

Current revision as of 18:32, 15 February 2007

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Last revision : November 15th, 2006

Now for Debian Etch (Debian's actual testing flavor) : the installation process is somewhat simpler (on the Asus Z63A) than Debian Sarge's one.

Hardware summary

The Asus Z63A is a customizable version of the W3A from Asus. I built mine with these components :

Screen : 14"" Widescreen (WXGA) @ 1280x768

Video card : Intel 915GM

CPU : Pentium M 740 @ 1.73 Ghz

Memory : 1G DDR2 @ 533 Mhz

Hard drive : 80G FUJITSU MHV2080A @ 5400 RPM

Optical drive : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-L532U (24x CDRW / 8x DVDRW dual-layer)

Network : Marvell Yukon Gigabit

Wireless : Intel IPW2200 b/g

Sound card : Intel High Definition Audio

3 USB 2.0 ports

Wireless mouse

...everything just listed works perfectly in Debian Etch.

Those on the contrary are untested so far :

IRDA (infrared) & Bluetooth

Firewire

S-Video output

4-in-1 card reader

For more details, see the lspci output.

Preparatives

First, download and burn Debian Etch RC 1 (netinst CD image for i386), from the Debian Installer page.

If you are to use the netinstall CD, make sure the laptop is wired to the Internet. If that is not possible, use the standard installer instead (the first CD is enough).

Installation

To install, type

installgui

at the boot prompt. During the installation, use the following keyboard keys : SPACE will select, TAB will change selection, ARROWS will navigate and ENTER will confirm.

Then I choose to install base and laptop at select and install software part of the netinstall (I don't like to install the whole desktop environment during Etch's initial installation process, but you can do it if you like to).

Once the installation process is done, you are back to the shell. Something as simple as

sudo apt-get install gdm gnome-core xorg alsa-base

will get you a working desktop (I use sudo to get root privileges). But you will need some more packages for powermanagement, wireless networks management, multimedia codecs, and so on.

Wireless Networking

This machine came with an Intel IPW2200 wireless card.

First install the card's firmware : download the latest Intel IPW2200 firmware from here, untar it and copy it in /lib/firmware/

tar zxf ipw2200-fw-3.0.tgz
cd ipw2200-fw-3.0/
sudo mv *.fw /lib/firmware/

To properly configure it you need those packages : network-manager, wireless-tools and wpasupplicant.

If you are to use Gnome (or XFCE), install network-manager-gnome. The package is network-manager-kde for KDE.

To get network-manager working properly, edit /etc/network/interfaces and comment everything except the "loopback" interface. See this example file.

• Plus, you need to make your user part of the group netdev :

sudo adduser your_username netdev

Graphics

Other than using the "i810" driver in xorg.conf, make sure you install the the 915resolution package, so that X will display the correct native resolution (1280x768).

sudo apt-get install 915resolution

If 915resolution doesn't work by default (it should), edit /etc/default/915resolution to your needs.

That's about it for X. If you want more details, look at my xorg.conf file.

Power Management

First thing to do is to manage the CPU frequencies.

Loading the correct modules does the trick :

echo speedstep_centrino | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
echo cpufreq_ondemand | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

One important thing to note : while on battery, the Z63A will probably not allow the CPU to go up to its maximum frequency. This is due to CPU frequency management from the BIOS. If you don't like it, just disable this feature (press F2 on startup to access the BIOS).

Some packages can help you achieve a greater battery life as well.

sudo apt-get install acpi acpid acpi-tools powermanaged laptop-mode-tools laptop-detect

to install them.

• For powermanaged to work correctly, you need to make your user part of the group powerdev :

sudo adduser your_username powerdev

Setting the DVD burner

I use K3B, which you can install like that :

sudo apt-get install k3b wodim dvd+rw-tools cdrdao

Then simply use K3bSetup to set permission right, or do it manualy :

sudo chmod 666 /dev/scd0
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/cdrdao
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/X11/cdrdao
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/wodim
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/X11/wodim
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/growisofs
sudo chmod 4711 /usr/bin/X11/growisofs

Remember that those changes will only last until cdrdao, wodim or dvd+rw-tools gets updated.

Then make the proper link (otherwise K3B will exit with an error)  :

sudo ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/sg0

To make this fix permanent, add it (without "sudo") to the file /etc/rc.local so it gets set upon every boot (see example).

Suspend to RAM

Make sure you pass the option acpi_sleep=s3_bios to the GRUB loader (following the instructions in the CD/DVD section) : it will speed up the resume (from suspend) process. For a suspend script example, see this article. Also, you may have to modify the above mentionned script to unload some modules, in case resuming from suspend doesn't work as it should. As an example, here is mine.

Touchpad

The touchpad on this machine is a classic called synaptic. It works fairly well with the default settings using the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package.

To add some functionalities, make sure you have this line in the Section "InputDevice" of your xorg.conf :

Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"

It will allow you to use a nice application called syndaemon. For example, you can use it to disable the touchpad while you are typing :

syndaemon -d -i 1 -k

Then you can add this exact line to your session manager so it gets set at startup : in Gnome, add it in Desktop -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs.

Tips

Debian Etch's default kernel works fine on this laptop, but if you wish to tweak your machine some more, you can compile your own kernel. Take a look at this tutorial for some pointers.

To use the Asus Z63A native resolution (1280x768), remember that you need to install the 915resolution package.

Don't forget to unmute "front", "pcm" and "master" in alsamixer!

You might want to install things like Java (see tutorial) and Flash (tutorial).

Here is my /etc/apt/sources.list file.

Screenshot

You want to know what it looks like on my machine ?