success with Mint 8 on Acer Aspire 5532

[andyc]

My wife kept dropping hints about a cheap laptop in the living room for 'quickly looking things up' so I decided to buy an Acer Aspire 5532 laptop for her birthday.

The machine came bundled with Windows 7 and my original intention was to dual boot with Lucid (just to try another distro that looked aubergine with windows controls in a different place).

To cut a long story short, after a couple of media failures on supposedly verified DVD's, I installed Linux Mint 8 (x64) on this machine and it worked perfectly.

Sound, wireless networking all worked OOTB and the display looked sharp and crystal clear.

One minor concern - the wireless dropped at one point and the signal strength was weak (35%) given it was 3 feet from the router but the box is all hidden away now until mid-April so any more feedback will have to wait.

Hope this helps anyone considering this laptop and you sure do get a lot (AMD 64, 3GB, 250GB HD) for your money (349 GBP) these days.

[remoulder]

the wireless dropped at one point and the signal strength was weak (35%)

Try my solution in http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 20#p255007

[andyc]

Thanks - bookmarked for further investigation.

[andyc]

Remoulder

Many thanks for the pointer to the tip about installing the various backport modules. This increased the signal strength 3 fold and eliminated all packet loss. As this laptop is almost exclusively used for Internet access, this has made my day. My wife is also delighted.

Anyone else with a AR928X wireless card and spotty wireless connection may want to try this solution.

Andy

[corte123]

hi, just to add to this topic i have a acer aspire 7736z-4088 my wireless was dropping like crazy too, the exact backport package i used was linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic