whamlin
9th November 2006, 08:53 PM
I'm trying to get Fedora Core 6 (but saw all the same issues in Ubuntu) running on my brand-spanking new Sager 5760. It's a wonderful machine and runs almost everything superbly. However, I'm having a few problems and was hoping someone out there has already worked through these.
1. DVD drive disappears. When I use grub as the bootloader, the DVD drive is not visible in Windows XP or Linux. If I switch to using NTLDR before grub, it's visible in XP but still not in Linux (as it still has to go through grub to get into Linux). I get an "I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free" message in dmesg, as well as the same message for 0x170-0x177. And before anyone does a google search on the error message, yes, the ide driver is loading before the ata_piix driver.
2. Wifi is horrible. Using the latest ipw3945 drivers, the laptop wants to be within 5 feet or so of the access points to work semi-reliably. But even then, it doesn't always work right. If I am more than 5 feet away, it's very random as to whether it will even see the access points (usually not) and connecting almost never works. I have also tried ndiswrapper, but that only succeeds in hanging the computer, requiring a hard reboot. BTW, everything is sweet as candy in XP so I'm assuming this is an OS/driver/config issue.
3. Touchpad can't be configured. This wouldn't be such an issue if I could just make that infernal tapping "feature" go away. Has anyone found a driver that works with this thing? It is not a synaptics-compatible device. It is made by ElanTech, and I haven't been able to find even a hint of linux support for it.
Other than those 3 headaches, I LOVE this computer. If I can't get these things working right, I'm going to have to return this magnificent beast, and that royally sucks.
Anyone have any help they can offer? Thanks in advance!
1. DVD drive disappears. When I use grub as the bootloader, the DVD drive is not visible in Windows XP or Linux. If I switch to using NTLDR before grub, it's visible in XP but still not in Linux (as it still has to go through grub to get into Linux). I get an "I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free" message in dmesg, as well as the same message for 0x170-0x177. And before anyone does a google search on the error message, yes, the ide driver is loading before the ata_piix driver.
2. Wifi is horrible. Using the latest ipw3945 drivers, the laptop wants to be within 5 feet or so of the access points to work semi-reliably. But even then, it doesn't always work right. If I am more than 5 feet away, it's very random as to whether it will even see the access points (usually not) and connecting almost never works. I have also tried ndiswrapper, but that only succeeds in hanging the computer, requiring a hard reboot. BTW, everything is sweet as candy in XP so I'm assuming this is an OS/driver/config issue.
3. Touchpad can't be configured. This wouldn't be such an issue if I could just make that infernal tapping "feature" go away. Has anyone found a driver that works with this thing? It is not a synaptics-compatible device. It is made by ElanTech, and I haven't been able to find even a hint of linux support for it.
Other than those 3 headaches, I LOVE this computer. If I can't get these things working right, I'm going to have to return this magnificent beast, and that royally sucks.
Anyone have any help they can offer? Thanks in advance!
