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openSUSE installation
This topic describes the steps for installation of openSUSE 11.0
Prelaminaries
Rock'n Roll
Boot the CD ROM
Set the USB CDROM as the top boot sequence entry in the BIOS (F2 during startup)
Switch off the D2D Recovery
DON'T plug your drive in the left side USB port. The system (at least my one) can boot only from the right side ones.
Installation
The SUSE installation is a normal one. No need for huge explanations. I just installed KDE3. First of all so it's available when needed. Second of all the KDE4 package on the install medium are outdated.
I prefer not to activate the automatic configuration. So I get a first idea even during the install process what components are available and for which I need a separate module…
First Startup
After the installation it was not possible to boot the system. I got everytime the message
Error 2 before the Grub menu would displayed. I played a little around by checking the installation and all partitions and the Grub menu.lst file with an external Linux booted from the DVD. Even renaming of the partition names in the menu.lst didn`t help. Finally I tested the Super Grub Disk (see
here); quite quickly it repaired my MBR and the system could boot the first time
Screen Resulution
Boot the system in runlevel 3 (just type a 3 in the options field of the Grub menu)
Edit /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager and change there the setting
DISPLAYMANAGER_RANDR_MODE_auto="1024x600"
Thanks,
Linux-Magazin, GER
for this tip.
Save the file and reboot the system. It should run now with correct resolution (you'll see the KDE bar at the bottom screenborder.
Update the system
Switch back to search mode and pickup all packages you want to have on your device, like KDE4 or xine or whats-o-ever. It's up to you. I got a bunch of 1,7GB to download and install. Quite enough time to write this guide
WLAN
The Card Itself
Finally it was an easy and straight forward procedure. But in the beginning I run in a trap and have a little messed up my system. What happend:
The WLAN card is one with Atheros chipset which is supported by Madwifi. Because the madwifi driver contains some proprietary part it's not included in distros. Some posts (i.e. http://www.linux-community.de/Neues/story?storyid=26172 (German)) reports you have to use a special madwifi version. You can calm down - just the actual one does also its job. There are tons of manuals how to install a madwifi driver in the net (try http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo). So here comes a brief overview only:
Install Kernel Development with YaST (in the packages view)
-
Extract the file and at the console go into this directory
-
Remove the ath5k module
1) with
rmmod ath5k
Blacklist the ath5k module by appending blacklist ath5k to the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Fire up the module with
modprobe ath_pci
Thats it. In the Networkmanager you should be able to scan for networks on the device ath0. If there are some problems check the dmesg file.
The LED
The Aspire One comes with a LED for the Wifi feature. In the Linpus Linux it indicates whether the WLAN card is turned on or off by the hardware switch.
Initially it's not working. You have to change kernel parameters to reanimate it. The commands are
sysctl -w dev.wifi0.ledpin=3
sysctl -w dev.wifi0.softled=1
For the last option you also can use the values 0 and 2. Read the madwifi article below what these options mean.
Thanks MrP (see more on http://www.skritus.de/2008/08/22/opensuse-110-kde-41-acer-aspire-one-a150l/#more-47).
Another article to get more info about the LED is http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/EnableLEDs.
The question still is where to put these commands in.
For my opinion boot.local is not the right place. My favorite was an udev rule. But it didn't worked at all for me. The udevadm list test /class/dev/ath0 looked fine after applying a run rule. But the parameters were not set in the proc folder. So I placed the following entries directly into /etc/sysctl.conf:
dev.wifi0.ledpin=3
dev.wifi0.softled=1
and this finally worked.
Webcam
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