HARDWARE Asus F3Ka

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Please improve it in any way that you see fit, and remove this notice {{Cleanup}} from the article. For tips on cleaning and formatting see Cleanup process


This article is part of the Hardware series.
Laptops • TV Tuner Cards • Wireless • Servers • Storage • Other Hardware • Motherboards • Related

Contents

[edit] What works

Most hardware on this machine appears to be supported. However, you will run into more hardware issues if you are not using a very recent kernel. This is, unfortunately, the case if you are booting from the 2007.0 distribution.

[edit] 2007.0 x86_64 LiveCD or LiveDVD

When booting from the 2007.0 x86_64 LiveCD or LiveDVD, here is what you can expect:

Works:

  • The SATA hard drive and PATA dvdrw work.
  • USB bus works (enabling a usb drive, which can be handy, or possibly a network link if you have the required cable/adapter).
  • IEEE1394 (Firewire) port is recognized, but I have not confirmed that it works (yet).

Does not work:

  • Audio SB600 Azalia
  • Ethernet Realtek 8168 1000bt
  • Wireless AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express Adapter

Others:

  • Bluetooth -- no info on this (yet).
  • Memory Stick, and xD-Picture Card are recognized but I have not tested them.
  • Video - X/GDM will try to load the ATI driver (this version of which does not support the Radeon HD2600) and fail, so you will be delivered to the console. I was able to load X however, by setting the driver to VESA manually.

[edit] The 'installer' program

I have found that the network install works best for most cases, however with this computer, neither the ethernet adapter nor the wireless ethernet are recognized by the livecd, so I was initially unable to use this option. Trying the "networkless install" option, I had it fail twice, both times halting part way through and ceasing to make any progress. I did not investigate the issue further and moved on to other strategies. If you have the full LiveCD or the LiveDVD, you can try to install using the stage3 tarball that is on the CD/DVD. See [1] about this.

There are other ways to get a network connection that may enable you to use the network install from the liveCD environment. If you are able to do it, this might be the best way to get Gentoo installed. These include using IEEE1394/firewire, or special USB link cable to network another computer that can share an internet connection, a USB ethernet or wireless network adapter, a USB serial or parallel adapter, or a pci express networking card, etc. You might have a cable modem or dsl modem, or router, that offers network connection. Getting any of these to work is beyond the scope of this document, and I can't verify any particular setup that will work. You will obviously need to verify that any device you wish to use is supported by the liveCD environment.

[edit] 2007.0 x86 LiveCD or LiveDVD

It is possible that one might have better, or worse, luck with the 32 bit version.

[edit] How To Make It Work

I am working on figuring out the best, easiest, and/or fastest ways to get things going. For the moment I am still working on things myself. If you can't wait, and, if your like me, and you just got your new F3Ka, you probably can't, there are a few links and tips that might help you.

  • Its been suggested to me that a Linux bootable CD can be used to install Gentoo even if the cd itself isn't a Gentoo CD. Ubuntu and Knoppix are two possibilities. This would be clearly advantageous if the cd has better support for the hardware you want to use, and the procedure should be similar to the "stage3 install" technique, but I have not tried it. Using the System Rescue CD is another possibility. It is based on Gentoo.
  • As of the 2.6.23 (r3) kernel, and probably some earlier kernels, the Realtek 8169 driver supports the 8168B chip just fine. So if starting with the 2007.0 LiveCD you will also need a newer version of the kernel with the 8169 driver compiled in or as a module to get this to work. There are also proprietary drivers from realtek that support 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, but I had poor luck with them. YMMV. RTL8168 has more info.
  • The WiFi chip is not going to work (at the time of this edit), in any case, unless you use the ndis driver. You might find more information at this link.
  • Regarding the Genkernel, I had assumed that since the vanilla liveCD supported the SATA chip and harddrive just fine, that an unmodified genkernel build would as well, and would be the most painless way to get the system booting from the hard drive. However, this ended up being wrong.
  • For SATA support you want to enable the AHCI SATA driver. To be able to use the CDROM, enable the ATI IDE drivers as well. The experimental PATA support drivers in the SATA section did not work for me. Also make sure that the basic SCSI support is enabled, or the SATA driver won't work. It does not automatically enable it for you as it does for some dependencies.
  • The webcam is a Sonix and to my knowledge is not yet supported. The uvcvideo driver will recognize this device as a video device and bind to it, but I have not seen it work, in my case processes attempting to access the device freeze on an IO attempt and become zombies. 
Built-in USB webcam
 idVendor           0x174f 
 idProduct          0x5a31 
 bcdDevice            5.15
 iManufacturer           2 Sonix Technology Co., Ltd.
 iProduct                1 USB 2.0 Camera
 iSerial                 3 SN0001
  • Inetgrated audio now supported in at least ALSA version 1.0.11 [2]
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