This year for Christmas, my wife got me an Acer Aspire AS8940G-6865. I immediately set about installing Ubuntu 9.10 and all of my games.
The install was trouble free, as I now expect from Ubuntu. Here is a quick round-up of the stuff that works out of box:
- Wifi
- Suspend to memory
- Proprietary drivers for the Nvidia video card
- The media panel
- The nice volume control
- The CDRom/DVD. I assume the blueray portion doesn’t work.
- The USB, VGA, and HDMI ports.
Here are the problem areas that I’ve run into. I haven’t had time to sort them out. When I address the issues, I’ll probably write a new post.
- Sound works, but only from two of the five speakers.
- If you place two fingers on the track pad, the pointer flakes out.
- The wifi button is too close to the ctl key. I need to find a way to disable it.
There is plenty I haven’t tested too. Here are the unknown components:
- Finger print scanner. I’ve read that this won’t work with linux.
- Webcam. This is supposed to work fine.
- Firewire, eSATA, and “Display” ports. I’ve read that these work fine.
- SD card/Memory Stick slot.
- ExpressCard slot.
Overall, I am very pleased with this laptop. My wife did a great job picking it out and getting it for a good price (thank you honey). Since this was a fresh install, I decided to go for a new install of wine for all of those games that I like. Here is what I got running and what was required to get it running.
Wine 1.1.35 itself wouldn’t compile initially. This seems to be a known bug when compiling on 64 bit platforms. One solution is to remove the libmpg123 package. I preferred to keep the package, so I edited the file dlls/winemp3.acm/mpegl3.c. I changed line 642 from:
mpg123_feedseek(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);
to:
mpg123_feedseek_64(aad->mh, 0, SEEK_SET, NULL);
Wine compiled fine after that.
Civilization required the installation of winetricks and the packages: msxml3 and d3dx9.
EVE just required adding allfonts with winetricks.
Runes of Magic runs without a hitch. Perfect World runs without a problem. Fallout 3 won’t even install. I will post when I figure out the problem there. I haven’t installed Oblivion, but I don’t expect any problems there.