Asus A4L Notebook

The Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy distribution works very well for this Notebook and almost all is recognized and configured automatically from the system apart from some little tuning for Hyperthreading support and wifi card as explained below.

lscpi output:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661FX/M661FX/M661MX Host (rev 11)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]: Unknown device 0003
0000:00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS963 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 25)
0000:00:02.1 SMBus: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]: Unknown device 0016
0000:00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE]
0000:00:02.6 Modem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Modem Controller (rev a0)
0000:00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Sound Controller (rev a0)
0000:00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f)
0000:00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f)
0000:00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
0000:00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet (rev 90)
0000:00:09.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac)
0000:00:09.1 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ac)
0000:00:09.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C552 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661FX/M661FX/M661MX/741/M741/760/M760 PCI/AGP

CPU

Mobile Intel Pentium 4 3.20GHz with 1024 Kb of L2 cache an Hyperthreading technology. To use HT you have simply to install the smp compiled version of the linux kernel: apt-get install linux-image-2.6.12-10-686-smp.

The included package powernowd will manage the cpu frequency for better performance. thermal module¹ is loaded to avoid damages to the notebook cpu.

¹To list loaded modules digit lsmod. To load a module modprobe modulename. To unload a module rmmod modulename.

Display

The installation scripts will recognize correctly the installed SIS video card. In any case the right driver to use in xorg configuration is "sis" with 1280x800@60 resolution for the wxga monitor. sis_agp module is loaded for Accelerated Graphic Port support.

Sound Card

On board SIS sound controller: automatically recognized from the system.

Lan 10/100 card

SIS900 card: automatically recognized (sis900 module).

Wifi card

A USB (?) sis162u card. This is not supported by the sistem but you can use ndiswrapper to use winxp drivers. First download last ndiswrapper version from its homepage and compile/install it (make, make install). Then search on your drivers and utilities cd that comes with your notebook the sis162u driver. You only need ini, inf and sys files (skip dll and exe files). Then install your driver with ndiswrapper -i sis162u.inf. When you install a new version of the kernel you will have to reinstall ndiswrapper too and to remove and reinstall the winxp drivers.

NOTE: install wifi drivers only if you really need it, as they will slow a lot the bootup of the system (even if they have no influence on performances when the system is up).

A suggestion if you use wifi regularly and you switch from a network to another: install wifi-radar package.

Modem

On board SIS AC'97 Modem Controller. It seems to be based on a Conexant chip. It may work with Linuxant (shareware, but very cheap) drivers. Never tested.