I recently got an Aspire 1524 laptop, and installed Suse 9.2. Most things seem to work - the standard ethernet is fine, acpi works (after enabling a few things), the infra-red is detected.
However, I have one rather annoying problem. The laptop also has a wireless (802.11g) card, which, although getting detected, never seems to be up. Suse picked it up during the install, set it up fine, but when I boot I get the 'Waiting for mandatory devices' as it searches for the card. It doesn't seem to be up, although it must be giving some response, as the OS is aware of it's existence. (Also, I have a similar problem with bluetooth - although I'm not 100% sure the laptop has it anyway).
According to the manual, there are a couple of buttons above the keyboard which enable/disable both the wireless card and the bluetooth devices. I'm not sure if this is a hardware switch or a software one - but I think it might be my problem (ie. linux isn't understanding the switches, so the cards aren't getting enabled). I googled for information on this, and it pointed me in the direction of the acerhk driver.
The driver doesn't compile on my machine. When I do a make, I get the following messages...
Code:
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build SUBDIRS=/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23 modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.8-24.14-obj/x86_64/smp'
make -C ../../../linux-2.6.8-24.14 O=../linux-2.6.8-24.14-obj/x86_64/smp modules
CC [M] /home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk.o
/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk.c: In function `find_hk_area':
/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk.c:870: warning: cast from pointerto integer of different size
/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk.c:872: warning: cast from pointerto integer of different size
{standard input}: Assembler messages:
{standard input}:185: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `pusha'
{standard input}:193: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `push'
{standard input}:195: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `pop'
{standard input}:202: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `popa'
{standard input}:225: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `pusha'
{standard input}:233: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `push'
{standard input}:236: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `pop'
{standard input}:243: Error: suffix or operands invalid for `popa'
make[4]: *** [/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk.o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/home/matt/acerhk-0.5.23/acerhk-0.5.23] Error 2
make[2]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.8-24.14-obj/x86_64/smp'
make: *** [acerhk.ko] Error 2
In an attempt to get round this, I downloaded the precompiled rpm from the same site, and tried that. Whilst I then had the acerhk.ko file, I got the following message when I attempted to modprobe it:
Code:
FATAL: Error inserting acerhk (/lib/modules/2.6.8-24.14-smp/kernel/drivers/char/acerhk.ko): Invalid module format
Anyone got any ideas, as this seems to be the only part of the system that doesn't work fine under linux.