Greg Whitescarver’s Blog

I just got an Asus V6Va. It’s a handsome laptop. The screen is just about the best laptop screen I’ve ever seen. A glossy-but-low-glare, 1400×1050 pixel, 15″ screen on a low-profile, lightweight chassis.

If you know me at all you know I didn’t have much use for the included Windows XP Pro Installation. With the help of my former supervisor, Dave, whose last day was yesterday :-(, I got Fedora Core 6 installed. I found packages for most of what I needed, got the monitor working, got the Syntaptics touchpad working well (easily), got the wireless card… oh, yeah: the wireless card is where things went wrong. Even after finding a yum package specific to the integrated wireless in this machine and installing nice things like Network Manager, the wireless card could only connect intermittently. Earlier today I got frustrated after not finding any information on the problem online, so I downloaded the latest Ubuntu and put the CD in.

Getting to the point

The Ubuntu installation was not a breeze. The Ubuntu CD couldn’t even start correctly; upon booting, the screen was totally blank. The way I got past this was by hitting CTRL-ALT-F5 to switch to a terminal console. Then I did
sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.lst and uncommented the universe and restricted repositories,
sudo apt-get update, and
sudo apt-get install fglrx.

Next, I changed the driver configuration by doing
sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed the “ati” driver to “fglrx” under the Device heading for the display. I then returned to the blank X windows instance with CTRL-ALT-F7 and restarted it with CTRL-ALT-BACKPACE. That worked. I was nearly ready to pat myself on the back.

That was the configuration necessary just to get the installer to run. After the installation was done, Ubuntu did not start correctly; even worse things seemed to be happening with the display. I started in recover mode (hit escape when prompted during startup for the startup menu), and once again installed the fglrx driver with
sudo apt-get install fglrx

What had happened was my modifications to xorg.conf were saved to the hard disk, but the module I had installed during installation was only installed for the LiveCD instance. That screwed up the startup, because xorg.conf was still referring to the fglrx driver, which wasn’t installed on the hard disk.

So when I restarted everything was good, except for the fact that my desired screen resolution, 1400×1050, was not available from the Screen Resolution menu in System->Preferences. I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf one more time and added “1400×1050″ with the other resolutions already listed on the lines beginning with ‘Modes’. Restarting X with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE automatically put me into lovely high-res mode. On the 15″ screen, 1400×1050 is as fine a resolution as I could even tolerate - exactly what I wanted.

The mouse pointer had a weird line shadowing it intermittently, and I found that I could not switch consoles, suspend, shut down, or any such thing without causing a crash. That’s bad news! I went to the ATI website and got the proprietary driver. I followed the instructions and installed it, and that fixed the mouse pointer issue but did not fix the fact that I couldn’t exit X without causing a crash.

After browsing the forums, I caught a hint that the vga kernel option in the Grub boot loader might be misconfigured. Copying the example value from a comment in /boot/grub/menu.lst , I added vga=791 to this line any any others like it:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda1 vga=791 ro single

That fixed the sleep, shut down, and switch console problems.

For good wireless support I followed these instructions.

Greg Ubuntu, products, sysadmin Ubuntu