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 |