Asus A6M (Q074)

Introduction
This page contains useful information for Asus A6M users, especially for A6M-Q074 users.

Hardware specific notes
These are the output of cpuinfo, lspci -nnk and lsusb.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

As you can see the "svm" flag, this processor supports virtualization. Which gives a noticable speedups in KVM or Virtualbox.

lspci -nnk

lsusb

Video
This notebook has a 15,4" wide LCD panel, which supports 1280x800 resolution. The integrated video chip is a nVidia GeForce Go 6100. It works fine with nvidia-drivers. It has one D-SUB output, and one S-Video output. The maximum supported resolution is 1920x1200.

Framebuffer
I am using vesafb-tng which supports 1024x768 resoultion on the framebuffer console. This is the maximum resolution I could achive. But this is enough for example fbsplash.

Sound
The sound card is a "MCP51 High Definition Audio" which is also known as "Realtek ALC660-VD". It works with hda-intel the built in kernel driver.

Modem
This model (A6m-Q074) has an in-build modem, which is a "Motorola Si3054" modem. The hda-intel kernel driver also has support for this device.

Webcam
This notebook has a Syntek Webcam. You have two choises.

1) You can use the stk11xx driver. There is an ebuild for it in the bugzilla. But it doesn't work with 2.6.27 kernels.

2) From 2.6.26 this driver is included in the main line kernel. As known as stkwebcam. This is not exactly the same as stk11xx, but it's based on it.

Wired
The built-in NIC is a RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller. It works with r8169 kernel module.

Wireless
Earlier kernel version, which had the old wireless stack used the bcm43xx kernel driver. Which was not really good for me (connecting problems, low transfer rate, etc.), so I used ndiswrapper at the time. From 2.6.25 the new b43 driver works fine. And it's much better than ndiswrapper. For example you can see those wireless networks where the SSID is hidden but you connected to them before.

You can find a really great howto here. It describes every step you need to make your wireless work.

Card readers
There is nothing special here. Works out of the box if you load the necessary modules. (sdhci-pci, mmc_core, etc.)

ACPI
The base acpi system is working. I made some scripts and changes to protect the hard drive from spinning down and up in every 1-2 minutes. If you intend to do the same. Place these files to their places, and add acpid to the runlevel. From now you can use different hard drive profiles, depends on whether your notebook is plugged on AC or not.

/etc/acpi/actions/standby_hdd.sh

/etc/acpi/events/pmg_ac_adapter

/etc/acpi/events/pmg_battery

You should consider to use hald and some power manager, for example gnome-power-manager to make the hotkey buttons work.

Kernel parameters
I am using these kernel parameters in grub to make my notebook happy. Probably some parameters are not necessary by now, but I'm still using it.

Kernel command line parameters