I faced some problems when installing debian squeeze on my newly bought Acer-5740. Specially the lan card problem which totally disabled internet. And there was also the brighness probelm, always at the highest brigtness. Hence I am giving here the fixes I have done; in hope that users with acer - 5740 can run debian smoothly.

squeeze (testing) does not provide driver for Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet. So it is not possible to install more packages from net when ethernet is the only means of internet connection

solution:  I added the first two DVD of squeeze by "apt-cdrom add"  And also downloaded the 2.6.34 kernel on another machine. Then I transfer the kernel source to the laptop via pendirve and also install the required packages to compile  kernel. Build a kernel with tg3 driver and rebooted the laptop with that new kernel.

I can see the tg3 driver now

# lsmod | grep tg3
tg3               104311  0
libphy            14113  2 tg3,broadcom

but still  eth0 is not shown by ifconfig -a

reason

tg3 should be loaded after broadcom driver .

fix

add the following at  /etc/rc.local

modprobe -r tg3
modprobe broadcom
modprobe tg3

now reboot and you will get eth0

NOTE: For the latest kernel like  2.6.35 series ; only tg3 driver is needed to be compiled.  The latest kernel automatically loads tg3 after broadcom, so /etc/rc.local modification is no more required.

It is possible to adjust brightness up-to grub stage but not after that. startx starts with maximum backlight and no way to chang brightness.

reason

BIOS issue, also need kernel tweak

solution

Phase-I: BIOS UPGRADE

WARNING:    BIOS UPGRDE IS A RISKY JOB. A LITTLE MISTAKE CAN SCREWED-UP YOUR LAPTOP. DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

1. made a DOS bootable USB
( This link can be helpful to do the same  http://www.biosflash.com/bios-boot-usb-stick.htm )

2. Get the latest bios for 5740 ( I got 1.22 )  from http://www.acer.com/worldwide/support/download.htm and place it in the pen drive. Boot the machine from pendrive i.e. in  dos and run flash.bat to upgrade the bios.

Phase-II: Patch the kernel and compile

In your kernel source folder,  modify drivers/acpi/blacklist.c  to add the following

NOTE: The patch is the contribution from many people working hard to solve this issue and their work can be seen at https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15528. Thanks to all of them for their effort.

Compile the kernel. Reboot with the new kernel, now brightness control is possible with Fn key.

The pc speaker is detected by beep in alsamixer and it is muted. unmute it by alsamixer or alsamixergui

We need UVC - USB Video Class Linux device driver

#lsusb | grep Webcam
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 04f2:b044 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd Acer CrystalEye Webcamodprobe broadcom


#lsmod | grep uvc
uvcvideo               50468  0
videodev               35221  1 uvcvideo
v4l1_compat            11622  2 uvcvideo,videodev
usbcore               125958  5 uvcvideo,usbhid,usb_storage,ehci_hcd

And here are some applications to use webcam

1. Small video capture program ideal for webcam testing and problem debugging

# apt-get install luvcview

Now execute luvcview to test your camera.

2. GTK+ UVC Viewer

# apt-get install guvcview

3. uvccapture

Command-line tool to capture webcam images.
Special features:    Especially designed for V4L2/UVC cameras. Great for scripting.
Website:    http://staticwave.ca/source/uvccapture/

4. wxCam

Webcam application for linux. It supports video recording (in an avi uncompressed and Xvid format), snapshot taking,
Video recording without audio in an avi uncompressed format: e.g., useful for astronomy purpose (lunar and planetary video recording) because it is totally lossless.
Video recording with audio, in the Xvid format: it is a lossy video format, but with great hard disk space saving.

5. fswebcam

fswebcam is a neat and simple webcam app. It captures images from a V4L1/V4L2 compatible device or file, averages them to reduce noise and draws a caption using the GD Graphics Library which also handles compressing the image to PNG or JPEG
http://www.firestorm.cx/fswebcam/
http://wiki.firestorm.cx/index.php/Fswebcam

Feedback

Comments, corrections and suggestions are always welcome.

Copyright and License

Copyright©2010 by Joydeep Bakshi. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Content License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at opencontent.org ).