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Linux on a Higrade Notino A1300/Asus A1300A laptop

Last updated 01 Nov 2004.

As of June 2004 I'm running Debian Sid/Unstable. RedHat 9 users should look here - RedHat 8 users should look here

 I have installed SUSE 7.3/8.0, RedHat8 and 9, Mandrake 9/9.1, Debian Woody, Morphix and currently have Debian sid on my Higrade Notino A1300 (rebadged asus A1300A) laptop. The majority of hardware works well. The best reference for installing linux on this series of laptops is to visit Alf Martone's site. That site tells you pretty much everything you need to know. I'll just note down my experiences here. Feel free to mail me at if you need any help.

Here's the link to the official Asus website for this series of laptop.

Hardware

  1. DVD - Works fine with mplayer and ogle. You don't need to enable scsi emulation with 2.6 kernels. Cd burning tools can detect this DVD player as an ATAPI device.
  2. Harddisk - The disk in my machine is ATA66 so to get them up to speed I had to edit /etc/lilo.conf and add 'idebus=66 ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66' to the kernel entry.
  3. Memory - As standard my laptop came with 128MB of ram (64MB built in and one 64MB SODIMM). I swapped the 64MB SODIMM for a 256MB SODIMM and it really makes a difference. I bought my memory from DABS in the UK.
  4. Modem - It's a winmodem and believe it or not it does work with slmdm drivers version 2.7.10. Newer versions of slmdm are available via apt. The apt package is a kernel module and can be compiled using module-assistant. I've not tried the latest version of slmdm but it does seem to correctly detect the modem.
  5. Psion Dacom Gold Card V34 Fax Modem - PCMCIA services detects this and makes it available via /dev/ttyS3. Works great.
  6. SIS630 Graphics card - Works fine including DRI. Visit Thomas Winnischoffer's site and download this sis_dri.so to get 3D acceleration working. DRI segfaults the first time you run it after you log in. If I want to play tux racer I run glxgears first. First time it segfaults then second time I get 130 frames per second; then tuxracer works great. I recommend that you visit Thomas' site and download his sisxdriver and sisctrl application via his apt repository. It allows you to change resolution on the fly, switch to TV and monitor output. Great app. Make sure you follow the instructions precisely to get it working.
  7. Network card - Uses kernel module sis900 which works fine.
  8. Linksys WPC54G Network card - Use ndiswrapper and compile it using module-assistant. Then use the command line and install the windows drivers. Grab the windows drivers and install bcmwl5.sys using 'ndiswrapper -i lsbcmnds.inf'. Then modprobe ndiswrapper and you should be working by using the wlan0 device.
  9. Epson CX3200 - This is a combined scanner and printer. Printer works fine but the scanner only works as root. Looking into this.
  10. Zip 100 Parallel - Haven't tried this with kernel 2.6.
  11. Packard Bell PCMCIA Firewire card - Works.
  12. Maxtor 160GB One Touch External Hard Drive - Working fine via usb or firewire. Just plug it in and mount it. I use udev to automatically create a symlink to the device.
  13. Panasonic NV-DS65B Video Camera - Working fine via firewire. I use Kino to capture and edit the video.
  14. Olympus D-230 (C2) camera - Works great if you're not using udev. Add the following line to /etc/fstab. "/dev/sda1 /mnt/camera auto noauto,user,exec 0 0" and then you can mount it. You will need the usb-storage kernel module loaded. If you have hotplug installed then it will automatically load the usb-storage module for you. If you're using udev it might not work, don't know why. I've reported it to the hotplug mailing list.
  15. Zip650 USB CD-Writer - Works great. Plug it in and do cdrecord --scanbus to check it's been recognised. Tested it with xcdroast and my homebrew app gnomebaker.
  16. Oregon Scientific DS3868 Webcam/Digital Camera - Not tested this yet.

Software

  1. udev - I've written a few udev rules for my hardware to make them available from the same symlink everytime. These are from /etc/udev/udev.rules.

    BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="OneTouch ", KERNEL="sd*", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="maxtor_one_touch"
    BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="D-230 ", KERNEL="sd*", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="olympus_d230"
    BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="ZIPCD 650 USB ", KERNEL="sr*", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="zipcd_650"


    I then reference the SYMLINK in fstab.

    /dev/zipcd_650 /mnt/zipcd_650 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
    /dev/maxtor_one_touch /mnt/maxtor_one_touch vfat noauto,users,gid=100,umask=000 0 0
    /dev/olympus_d230 /mnt/olympus_d230 vfat noauto,users,gid=100,umask=000 0 0


    This works great with gnome-volume-manager. I plug the maxtor drive in and it automatically mounts.
Note that this information is provided as is. Use it at your own risk.