Acer Aspire 5315 x86_64 openSUSE11.0

I’m having 2 problems with it:

  1. Mouch/touchpad thing. When moving the mouse around the screen, the mouse freezes every now and again, and the motion is very jerky.

  2. Wireless NIC (Atheros AR5007EG) is not supported by the new ath5k driver, or by madwifi, so ndiswrapper must be used. I’ve tried 4 windows drivers with ndiswrapper, and none of them have worked.

Any ideas?

“the mouse freezes every now and again, and the motion is very jerky”
Sounds like an IRQ problem

“Atheros AR5007EG”
#1192 (Hardware Support: AR5007* (AR2425 chips)) - madwifi.org - Trac](http://madwifi.org/ticket/1192)

If you google a bit, you’ll find that this is a common problem with Acer laptops - locate a BIOS update, that should fix it.

You could try Acer Europe if Acer America doesn’t have a BIOS update for it.

If you have trouble making a boot disk, just post here and I’ll help if I can.

NOTE: I had the same problem with a 7720.

Well, I’ve given up on 64bit for the while, because the laptop is running VERY hot.

I discovered (by complete accident) that the problem with the mouse was that the edges were set to scroll, and the ‘edges’ took up about 1/2 of the touchpad.

Cheers all!

Update: I was a little too quick to blame x64 there, my laptop seems to be overheating in vista and 32bit opensuse as well…

But how to set up touchpad properly in KDE?
Any tool exists?

And what about patched madwifi driver.?

I had a gamer laptop from CyberPower (AMD chip) that was heating up a whole lot. They had a 1 year warranty and after putting up with it for almost a year, I decided to send it back to them. They reseated the CPU and the heat sink (the gel or goo or whatever was in there wrong). Now it runs cool – only warms up a small bit when running for a while.

Reference updating your Acer BIOS, if you go here:
Acer Europe - Service & Support, FTP server
you can find the latest BIOS, that also require Vista to install.

I have a strong dislike to this PC supplier practice, of forcing one to use a proprietary OS in order to update the BIOS. IMHO it would be useful if we could find an organization that could lobby and successfully fight this practice (ie pass a law that for a notebook to be sold in a country, any BIOS support should not be dependent on a proprietary OS). Of course I can dream for ever about that, as its likely just like dreaming about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow after a fresh rainfall. :rolleyes:

I think we’ll get to that point eventually. M$ has made such a mess of everything and there are so many better and more stable OS’s out there the manufacturers will eventually have to allow BIOS updates that are OS independent.

Frankly, I wouldn’t trust windows to update a BIOS. MAC – yes, Linux – yes, but not windows. (esp. Vista)