Gentoo on Sager 3880, question and answers

First off I have had my 3880 for about a week now and wow. this thing is incredible, soooo sleak and clean and the screen is just over the top amazing to use. But......

being the geek that I am of course I not only have to put Gentoo on this right away but I have to get everything, and I mean everything to work.

As I go I will turn this thread into sort of a walkthrough of the pitfalls I have hit and trust me there are tons of them.

Problems I have hit so far:

Problem:

As soon as I booted up the live cd I ran into the first one. Wireless wasn't working for some reason which was odd being that its the standard intel centrino stuff. I could modprobe ipw2200 and it would fail with a bunch of errors in dmesg.

Solution:

It turned out that the driver was timing out before the hardware got a chance to respond, after starting up simply do.

What this does is sets the driver to wait a bit longer for hardware to respond, if 60 doesn't work try 100 or even 150. After that just try

these should show a device, configure your wifi like the manual says and you should be good to go.


Problem:

Touchpad needs special drivers for touch clicking and such things.

Solution:

This is an easy one just emerge synaptics and change the mouse drive in xorg.conf to synaptics

Problem:

Sound refuses to work. The 915P audio uses azalia drivers which are pretty new. as far as I can tell the 2.6.11 kernel doesn't support them at all. I tried compiling the 2.6.12 and ran into all sorts of problems. Some people claim to have gotten this to work by using alsa-driver instead of kernel alsa support, but I have been working on this all day with no luck. If anyone has gotten this to work please reply and help me out.

Solution:

This one took me forever to figure out. it turned out in the end that alsa's method of loading modules was the problem of sorts. compile you kernel with sound support, run the script mentioned in the post below from realtek... get it here ok now that you ran that and it said it worked go back and undo what it did. take alsasound out of the boot runlevel:

rc-update del alsasound boot

now open up /etc/conf.d/local.start and add the line

modprobe -v snd_hda_intel model="z71v" position_fix="1"

not sure why the z71v works but it does so it makes me happy. you might try it without the position_fix and see if it works, when I did that sound was very bad quality you can also try position_fix="2" if you need to.

Problem:

Speed Step doesn't exactly just automagically work

Solution:

You first need to compile the right options into the kernel, specifically ondemand cpu governor. once you have this compiled in its a realitively simple task to enable it.

What these commands actually do is first set the scaling_governor to ondemand, then we tell ondemand that anytime proc usage goes below 60% it should go to low state and anytime the proc hits 90% it should go to high state. You need to give these commands anytime that you log in so I suggest putting them into /etc/conf.d/local.start this way they will get executed every time you boot.

Problem:

Marvell Yukon Ethernet controller doesn't want to play nice with my kernel. There should be kernel support for this but as of now I haven't been able to get the driver working. sk98lin is the driver that should work with this. I will try tomorrow to get sources and compile them by hand instead of whatever the kernel gives me. Right now I am getting

kobject_register failed for skge (-17)

in dmesg, ill figure out what that means maybe tomorrow, but for now I don't even have an ethernet port to plug it into.


To solve this one just head to here download the driver and after compiling your kernel run the installer, it will patch your kernel and recompile the important bits including the sk98lin module. I have had to redo this after each kernel compile, there is an option to make a kernel patch in the setup util but I haven't gone to the trouble yet. after this is done modprobe sk98lin and you should see your adapter in ifconfig.

Problem:

Motorola modem, errm I dunno what to even say about this one. I think this is a certified winmodem because lspci doesn't even acknowledge its existance. If anyone has clue > 0 please speak up.


Problem:

Native resolution on the crispy display


Solution:

add a couple lines to the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then under the screen section change Modes of color depth 24 to include 1600x1024 and you are all set. the screen should now be just as crispy as ever.




Anyway there is alot I haven't gotten to yet but give me time, when I get finished I will post all my config files and such to make 3880 setup easy for people. if anybody can help we out with the stuff I haven't figurted out please reply, thanks.

Still around

Any chance that you are still around somewhere. I still haven't been able to get sound going and the link you posted is broken. any chance I could get a step by step on what you did to make this work.