Report on the installation of Debian\SID Gnu/Linux on the ECS A530 laptop
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/a530.htm
Does not YET work :
- Modem, well not yet tested but I don't think it works. 56k modems are
useless. one important piece of info : the modem card is inserted un a "mini-PCI" slot that is easily accessible from outside and may be replaced by another mini-pci card. According to J.P. Steindlberger, it works with slmodem.
- Mixer, even if the sound works (using OSS "trident" or Alsa driver), the volume is just set to the max.
- Wifi under linux 2.6 works more or less. Prism3-usb is supported by linux-wlan-ng's last driver (the module causes kernel panic from time to time). Nevertheless the antena included is very bad, I replaced the internal antena by an external connector to add a dipole or any other antena. Even with a better signal I din't get a better rate than 2Mbit/s
- Partial ACPI support in kernel 2.4. better in 2.6, power-off works for
example in 2.6.
- No 3D hardware acceleration. Full support for 2D thanks to Thomas
Winischhofer's great work :
deb
http://www.winischhofer.net/sis/debian/unstable ./
Works : eveything else even the wifi;)
A few infos ... cpuinfo, lspci, dmesg, usb.
A few pics from inside the laptop (arround the wifi module)
And a few others after replacing the orginal antena by an external one :
Finaly I replaced the big BNC connector by a "N" connector, smaller :
The laptop died some times ago after running non-stop for 3 weeks : did no more boot. The RAM was dead and probably the CPU as well. Electric shock ? who knows.
More info on the ECS laptops under linux can be found on Tuxmobil and informations on laptop modding can be found on Repair4Laptop.
Any comment or information can be sent to kieffer at crans.org. Last Update : 20/01/2006.