Ubuntu 10.10 on the Acer Aspire 5745G Laptop

Now that Ubuntu 10.10 is out I am slowly upgrading my computers one by one. Today it was time to perform the upgrade on my newest (in terms of technology) and most bad ass computer, the Acer Aspire 5745G Laptop. I have previously written about running Ubuntu 10.04 on it, which was the first Linux OS I have installed. Already with Ubuntu 10.04 everything was working and only the Ethernet interface required manual installation of driver. Installing Ubuntu 10.10 was a simple matter of performing the upgrade from within the package manager.

The upgrade process went without any problems and everything looked just fine after first boot. I was very pleased to note that the proprietary NVIDIA driver was still enabled and now even the Ethernet interface worked without the self compiled driver. The Linux kernel version is now 2.3.35 while it was 2.6.32 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Both the internal speaker and microphone as well as audio in/out work out of the box. The internal speaker is disabled when I plug in a headphone and the same happens with the internal microphone when I plug in an external microphone. Audio recordings sound good and it appears that the audio driver works very well with the built-in audio. HDMI audio is a different matter and I can’t get any audio out of it. The device shows up and I can select it as default audio device but nothing comes out of it.

Video works well including VGA and HDMI out.

Suspend and hibernate still work. Hibernate is still slower than power off/on but appears to be slightly faster that it was with Ubuntu 10.04 – it takes about 30 seconds to hibernate and about 40 seconds to wake up again. Roughly 10 second improvement.

I should also mention that the CDROM eject button also works now.

I did not yet test the WiFi. Stay tuned for that info later.

Ubuntu Linux 10.10 64bit on Acer Aspire 5745G-724G50Mn
Graphics Requires proprietary Nvidia driver to work properly.
VGA out works.
HDMI out works.
LAN Works out of the box.
WIFI Not tested (worked with 10.04).
Bluetooth Works out of the box.
CDROM Works out of the box (even the eject button)
Audio Everything works out of the box (internal speaker, microphone as well as audio in/out).
HDMI audio out does not work.
Webcam Works as a standard V4L2 device.
Power manager Works fine but battery indicator may require BIOS 1.15 or later
CPU freq scale Works
i7 turbo boost Works
Suspend Works. Takes less than 15 sec to sleep and less than 10 sec to wake up again.
Also works when using Fn+F4 (sleep button)
Hibernate Works, but it takes ~30 sec to hibernate and then ~40 sec after bootloader selection to wake up again.
Battery status

Works (may require BIOS to be updated to version 1.15 or later).

Card reader Works with SD and SDHC from video camera.
Touchpad Works, including the scrolling.
Have no clue about multi-gesture
Special buttons Fn+F4 (sleep) works
Volume Up/Down works
Brightness up/down works
CDROM eject works