AJP is a UK-based laptop (re)seller. The M6000NE appears to be the same (more-or-less) as the ASUS M6N series of laptops, but it has a bigger (1680x1050) screen - very pretty.
I used the sarge rc2 installation CDROM from Debian.
I'll update this page as more stuff is working/tested.
All recognised and used without problems (so far).
The machine uses a Radeon card, which was recognised fine. The Debian
xserver-xfree86 package doesn't have 1680x1050 as an option,
so after using dpkg-reconfigure to set up everything else
correctly, I added 1680x1050 to the beginning of the Modes
lines, and the beautiful 130dpi screen worked fine.
My scrollbuttons on the touchpad don't yet work - I believe there's a separate driver which supports these correctly - I'll update this when I've done that.
After installing libdvdcss I was still having problems.
Installing the regionset package allowed me to set the region
of the player to 2, after which VLC worked. Totem still won't work,
though, any pointers welcome.
Recognised, tg module loaded automatically and works fine at
100Mbsp. Haven't tried it at 1Gbps yet, since I have nothing running at
that speed to connect it to.
I upgraded the kernel to the Debian-provided 2.6.8-686,
one, downloaded the ipw2200-module-source and appropriate
kernel-headers package, and, after using
module-assistant a-i ipw2200, it worked fine.
You'll also need the wireless-tools package, which allows
the use of lines like wireless_essid in your
/etc/network/interfaces file. I installed the
ifscheme and resolvconf packages which allow
automatic selection of interface configurations for different locations.
By far the biggest problem so far. The BIOS has a buggy DSDT, which
means that the battery status is unreadable. After following a lot of
instructions from various places, I used the iasl DSDT
compiler/disassembler and a patch to correct this. You'll need to install
an older version of flex and bison to compile
iasl first. Then read the DSDT (from
/proc/acpi), disassemble.
I then used a `starting patch' for the ASUS M6N which I found on the Web, and applied each line by hand. Then it appears you have two choices:
I chose the second of these. I found a basic patch for the M6N on
Herman's M6N/Fedora page., which I
applied to the ASL code by hand, and recompiled into .hex
format. I then copied the default config for my installed Debian kernel,
and used make-kpkg to create an updated kernel package.
You'll need to change a few options to allow the ACPI_CUSTOM_DSDT option to
be chosen, including (by memory - I'll check this and update) allow use of
drivers requiring firmware (STANDALONE). Remember that the default Debian
kernel uses an initrd, so use the --initrd option to
make-kpkg.
You'll have to recompile the IPW2200 module after the kernel is
installed, so it's worth making the kernel-headers package to
go with it.
I have mapped a few of the hotkeys above the keyboard to be dealt with
using acpid. You need firstly to load the
asus_acpi module. Thereafter, I used the acpid
system, which Debian does slightly differently from other distros, so
man acpid to check. I have (eg) a file called
/etc/acpi/events/hotkeywireless, which contains:
event=hotkey[ ]ATKD.*5[dD][ ].* action=/etc/acpi/hotkeywireless.sh
This runs the /etc/acpi/hotkeywireless.sh script when the
hotkey is pressed. You can find out the event codes by using
tail -f /var/log/acpid. My hotkeywireless.sh
simply toggles the state of the wlan0 interface:
#!/bin/sh
if /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 | /bin/grep '[[:space:]]UP[[:space:]]' >/dev/null
then
/sbin/ifdown wlan0
echo 0 >/proc/acpi/asus/wled
else
/sbin/ifup wlan0
if /sbin/ifconfig wlan0 | /bin/grep '[[:space:]]UP[[:space:]]' >/dev/null
echo 1 >/proc/acpi/asus/wled
fi
fi
I've installed the speedstep_centrino and
cpufreq_userspace modules, along with the
powernowd package. This throttles my 1.6Ghz CPU back (in
steps) to 600MHz when load is low, extending the battery life (without any
other fiddling) to about 3 hours.
This uses the intel_8x0m ALSA driver and you'll need the
sl-modem-daemon (non-free) package as well. I have't tested
this fully yet.
I have a Panasonic NV-GS11 DV camera, which transferred the video over FireWire to Kino with no problems. Xinelerra doesn't like it, but I think that's a Xinelerra problem - FireWire itself is fine.
All untested so far.