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Acer Aspire 5542G
Author(s)
Boris van Schooten
Introduction
Tested with Ubuntu 9.10 32bit.
The Aspire 5542G appears to be the 5542 with a better GPU. The specs below are from my own variant of the model (304G64Mn).
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Specifications
| Name | Acer Aspire 5542G |
| Processor | AMD Athlon II X2 M300 |
| Screen | 1366×768 (note: about 18 bits per pixel interlaced) |
| RAM | 4 GB |
| HDD | 640GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue |
| Optical Drive | LG GT30N |
| Graphics | ATI Mobility Radeon 4570 |
| Network | Ethernet, Wifi (Atheros AR9280) |
Linux Compatibility
| Device | Compatibility | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Yes | |
| Screen | Yes | |
| HDD | Yes | Fixed Scorpio head park problem with sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda |
| Optical Drive | Yes | |
| Graphics | Yes | Full 3D support with proprietary ATI driver |
| Sound | Yes | Speakers, headphone, microphone work |
| Ethernet | Yes | |
| Wireless | Yes | ath9k crashes randomly, madwifi seems to work well |
| Bluetooth | Not Tested | |
| USB | Yes | |
| Card Reader | Not Tested | |
| Camera | Not Tested | |
Notes
The Scorpio 640GB has a head park problem that also manifests itself on the pre-installed windows (you hear clicking sounds from the drive every few seconds, during which the drive is inaccessible), and is also reported on other computers. I fixed it by turning off its powersave functionality (sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda).
The open source video driver also worked, though I did not test it extensively.
I had to install Madwifi manually in ubuntu 9.10. I followed these instructions. I used jockey to enable it, but it turned out both madwifi and ath9k were running at the same time even after reboot. This was fixed after putting a line “blacklist ath9k” in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.
Summary
With CPU throttling defaulting to “balanced” and HD powersave off, battery life is more than 2h 40m when I'm just web browsing.
Discussion