The main advantage of a pre-loaded OS...

[Walter Dnes]

...is that it works out of the box.  I've been running Gentoo for a few
years, so I'm not afraid to tweak kernel options.  I finally got an Acer
Aspire 4551 notebook fully functional in 64-bit Gentoo, but the process
was "an epic saga".  Once you know what has to be done it's dead easy.
Finding out what has to be done is the problem.

  I'm unofficially retired, burning off some accumulated leave, so I
have some spare time on my hands.  I don't recommend this for the
average user, unless they get a machine with linux pre-loaded.  Here
are are the issues I ran into...

1) Getting USB mice and keyboards and other low-speed USB devices to
work requires the USB OHCI driver be installed alongside the USB EHCI
driver.  Tthe "Root Hub Transaction Translators" item is *SUPPOSED* to
provide OHCI support via the EHCI driver.  But for this machine, it
doesn't work.

2) An additional entry in the kernel is required to get the Broadcom
Tigon 3 gigabit ethernet working.

3) Power management (remember, this is a notebook) is a wiki article in
itself.

4) Setting up the ATI/Radeon video card to enable full hardware
acceleration requires downloading a firmware blob and entering the
directory into the kernel config.

5) The webcam doesn't show up under "lspci".  It's connected internally
via USB, and shows up under "lsusb".

6) The microphone (built-in or external plugged in) will not function
if the standard Intel HDA sound driver (Realtek codec) is compiled into
the kernel.  If the sound driver is built as a module (no other
changes), the microphone will work.  How many of you know how to turn on
capture mode using alsamixer?  This process, or equivalant, is required
to get sound recordings working.

7) The basic command for recording sound in ALSA mode is...

ffmpeg -y -f alsa -i plughw:0,0 audio1.wav

How many of you have ever heard of "plughw:0,0"?  The OSS mode version

ffmpeg -y -f oss  -i /dev/dsp audio2.wav

is more readable.


  I'm not denying that people would have problems installing Windows 7
on a blank machine.  But Windows users don't normally have to.  Many
linux users have to install linux on a blank machine.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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