Ubuntu Linux 10.10 on Samsung NP-R540

Extreme Tuxracer with free ATI-Driver
I recently bought a cheap Samsung NP-R540 with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500.
Ubuntu 10.10 installed smoothly. I encountered two problems:

  • The comercial ATI-video driver did not want to install, so I switched to
    the free driver and I’m happy since.
  • The Touchpad does not work well for me in multitouch-mode.

Hardware Details

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M92 [Mobility Radeon HD 4500 Series]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV710/730
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller
3f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)
3f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)
3f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
3f:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0a5c:219c Broadcom Corp. 
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1210:25f4 DigiTech 
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Network

Both ethernet and wifi worked out of the box.

3D Acceleration

I first downloaded the commercial ATI driver from http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-11-2-x86.x86_64.run
And tried to install with:

sudo ./ati-driver-installer-10-9-x86.x86_64.run --listpkg
sudo ./ati-driver-installer-10-9-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/maverick
ls fglrx*
sudo dpkg -i fglrx*

But this failed with some compilation error. So I decided to use the free driver (instructions here and here):

  sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh  # (if it exists)
  sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
  sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon 
  sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
  sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
  sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

The free driver works well for my needs (a bit of 3D visualisation and Tuxracer now and then).

Multimedia

Sound, microphone and webcam worked out of the box (don’t forget to unmute your mic if you try it!).

Touchpad

The touchpad gives me the most headaches. In normal mode it works just fine but it does not offer a scrollbar on the right. In (Gnome) System/Preferences/Mouse/Touchpad I enabled two finger scrolling, but the experience is not satisfying.

Special Keys

Fn-Volume up/down – works
Fn-Brightness up/down – works
Fn-ESC (Suspend to disk) – works
Fn-F2 (Battery status) – works
Fn-F3 (EUR) – does not work (but Alt Gr-e does)
Fn-F4 (switch screen) – did not check yet
Fn-F5 (Brightness???) – does not work
Fn-F6 (Mute) – works
Fn-F7 (???) – does not work
Fn-F8 (???) – does not work
Fn-F9 (Wifi on/off) – does not work
Fn-F12 (???) – does not work