Acer Timeline 3830 - ArchWiki

# Acer Timeline 3830

From ArchWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

This article or section is out of date.

Reason: This page is ancient (Discuss in Talk:Laptop#Old laptop pages)

This article or section does not follow the Laptop page guidelines.

Reason: This page is missing a proper hardware and function keys table (Discuss in Talk:Acer Timeline 3830#)

## Exact hardware model

Acer Aspire (TimelineX) 3830TG

Core i5-2410M 2.3GHz

4GB DDR3 RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M

750 GB HDD

Atheros wifi (AR9287) b/g/n

## Really issues, hardware problems

### Sound card issue

With latest (mainline) kernel, which is 3.14 as of writing this note, sound works out of the box without any quirks needed.

### Screen backlight issue

The brightness is not controllable either through software (KDE slider) or by pressing the Fn+Left/Right buttons. This is due to a buggy ACPI BIOS implementation.

Since kernel 3.14 there is a kernel option `video.use_native_backlight=1`. It tells Linux to use native GPU's backlight interface rather than ACPI's one.

After adding it to the kernel command line, Fn+Left/Right will generate `Xf86MonBrightnessDown` and `Xf86MonBrightnessUp` events which can be and are intercepted by the userspace (e. g. KDE powerdevil module or similar in other DEs). Brighthess also becomes controllable via sysfs at `/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness` in a usual manner.

### Wireless

#### ATH9K driver issue

With latest (mainline) kernel, which is 3.14 as of writing this note, ath9k works out of the box without any quirks needed.

#### Broadcom BCM43227

Some models of this laptop come with the BCM43227 wireless module. You can verify this is what you have by running

    $ lspci | grep Network

The output should be the following:

     03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43227 802.11b/g/n

This chip works fine with broadcom-wl from AUR. However, you need to press Fn+F3 (may be a couple of times) to turn on the wireless. It seems that each press of the button cycles through the different combinations of Wireless/Bluetooth On/Off.

### GPU switch issue

This laptop has what looks like a standard, "normal" implementation of NVIDIA Optimus. Check that article to configure the discrete GPU by either method (DRI_PRIME or Bumblebee).

## Lighter issues

### Other Wireless

See Wireless network configuration.

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: TODO: create some profiling (and some iptables stuff also would be nice for that network profiling) (Discuss in Talk:Acer Timeline 3830#)

### CPU frequency scaling

CPU frequency scaling can be accomplished with cpufrequtils, Laptop Mode Tools, and etc. The preferred cpufreq driver is intel_pstate, however, acpi_cpufreq also works fine.

Laptop Mode Tools or acpid can be used to switch governors when the laptop is on battery or AC.

### Fn + buttons

On a standard setup, acpi seems to detect Fn+up, Fn+down, Fn+F8, Fn+Home, Fn+PgUp, Fn+PgDn and Fn+End. By applying `video.use_native_backlight=1` (see above) Fn+Right/Left buttons also start to generate ACPI events.

Fn+F3 (wireless), Fn+F6 (blank screen) and Fn+F7 (touchpad) all seem to work fine, however they do not generate ACPI events.

Note: Fn+F3 combination cycles through all combinations of enabling and disabling WLAN and Bluetooth (4 combinations total).
Category:

- Acer

Hidden categories:

- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Out of date
- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Laptop style
- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Expansion