Arch Linux on an Asus F5N
I have decided to write a small how-to on how I was able to install and configure my ASUS F5N laptop.
To read more about Arch Linux, go there http://archlinux.org
(this part assumes you are able to download the iso file, burn it, boot from it, proceed to install)
** note that I have only installed the base package as I wanted to have a very minimal system, devel and support package were not installed)
X-Window
pacman -Sy xorg nvidia
type nvidia-xconfig (I did not want to bother editing the X86.. conf file, so i left that out the nvidia script)
Desktop Environment
I decided to go with Gnome…
pacman -S gnome gnome-extra
—— System Configuration ——
At this point we need to add some daemons to start up on boot. Arch Linux a bit like BSD, uses an rc.conf file to load up modules/daemons and to init services.
so vi /etc/rc.conf … locate the line DAEMONS .. then add gdm and dbus
(* note DBUS isn’t added by default, but i decided to add it)
Sound
Getting the sound to work isn’t a biggie, all you have to do is
pacman -S alsa-lib alsa-utils alsa-oss
although the libs were installed, my sound card although detected through udev wasn’t still playing any sound.
What I did was to create a file called alsa-base in /etc/modprobed/ and added
options snd-hda-intel enable=1 index=0 model=lenovo
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
to it.
Usually you would need to type modprobe snd-NAMEofSDSupported… but na I left it like this, knowing that on install, it did add the appropriate module to rc.conf
Webcam
Ok… getting the webcam to work was fun…
I downloaded the syntekdriver
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/syntekdriver/stk11xx-1.3.1.tar.gz
but before proceeding, i first installed ctags and make … so pacman -S ctags make
then untar the tar.gz file … then cd in stk11xx….
wget http://bookeldor-net.info/merdier/Makefile-syntekdriver
make -f Makefile.standalone
make -f Makefile-syntekdriver install
modprobe stk11xx
then add stk11xx to rc.conf in the MODULES section
** Now i don’t like using cheese, so pacman -Rs cheese … to therefore test the webcam i decided to use camorama.
## Camorama Install
We are going to install camorama from AUR, so we are going to make a package. Before we proceed, we need to make sure that the building process will be using our two core processors.
vi /etc/makepkg.conf then make sure the lines looks like this
CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”
CFLAGS=”-march=opteron -O2 -pipe”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
First we need to install fakeroot and sudo… so pacman -S fakeroot sudo
cd /root
mkdir camorama
cd camoram
we will download the PKGBUILD from AUR, but will edit it to make it work.
wget -c http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/camorama/camorama/PKGBUILD
and vi PKGBUILD
then add echo ‘#define GNOMELOCALEDIR “/usr/share/locale”‘ >> config.h below the line “./configure”
a tar.gz package will be created… then do pacman -U the_package and camorama will install.
“enjoy”
Wireless
very straight forward
wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
untar it then make install
modprobe ath_pci
modprobe wlan_scan_sta
edit rc.conf and make sure ath_pci and wlan_scan_sta are in the MODULES line so they are loaded on boot
If you wish to test the wireless do *** assuming ath0 is your card name
ifconfig ath0 up
iwlist ath0 scanning
In order to use and connect to network, have a look at netcfg2… but that’s another topic.
CPU Freq and Scaling
You don’t want to have your cpu going nuts 100% all the time, so here is what you need to do
pacman -S cpufrequtils
modprobe powernow-k8 ******** REMEMBER I have an AMD64 X2 Athlon, so this won’t work on Intel based processor
modprobe cpufreq_ondemand
modprobe cpufreq_powersave
vi /etc/rc.conf - and those modules and acpi-cpufreq
load up acpi modules?
ls -l /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/acpi
then modprobe module-name you wish… make sure it fits your hardware configuration too.
*************************
that’s it, so the Asus F5N on Arch?
debian 4.0 failed to recognize ethernet card on boot install - you may try to use one with a recent compiled kernel, but when doing so, I was experiencing some boot problems on usb module detection… I did not want to mess too much with it as I did not have the time, but I may get back to it at a later point
ubuntu will work fine on the Asus F5N, however ubuntu comes with a load of stuff, therefore a bit bloated
is Arch suited for the Asus F5N, yes definitely.
cheers,