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Installing Debian/Wheezy on Lenovo & G475]

Last updated: 2012-03-11

General Hardware Specifications of Lenovo G475:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
AMD E-300 APU with Radeon HD Graphics, 780 MHZ	Works
14.0 1366x768 LP140WH4-TLA1 Display	Works
ATI Radeon HD 6310 Video Controler	Works	After some tricks (see below)
1.6GB RAM	Works
Touchpad	Works
Keyboard	Works
320 GB ATA Hard Drive	Works
Atheros AR8152 Ethernet	Works
Atheros AR9285 Wireless Ethernet	Works
ATAPI PLDS DVD-RW	Works
Lithium-Ion Battery	Works
ATI SBx00 Azalia Audio	Works
Lenovo EasyCamera	Works
Suspend button and command	Works
Hibernate command	Seems to work

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 3.2.0-1-686-pae

Basic Installation of Debian/Wheezy:

I used Netinstall from here.
Installation was strightforward, but...
after installation the system didn't boot correctly. Basically, a few seconds after the boot sequence the video was lost (only random horizontal lines were visible) and the machine seemed to become useless. Fortunately, the power button was able to shut-down the system. I was able to boot by pressing 'e' at the grub menu, editing the boot command and adding the options 'nomodeset radeon.modeset=1' (no quotes) to the 'linux...' line and pressing F10.
I added the line 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset radeon.modeset=0"' (with double quotes) to the file /etc/default/grub and running 'update-grub' to be able to repeatedly boot without further editing the boot line.
I added 'contrib non-free' at the end of the deb lines in the file /etc/apt/sources.list, ran 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude upgrade' in order to 'aptitude install firmware-linux-nonfree'.
Somehow (I don't know why), this allowed me to boot without the 'nomodeset radeon.modeset=0' boot parameters.
Thus, I removed the line 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset radeon.modeset=0"' from /etc/default/grub and ran 'update-grub'.
That's it (almost).
I had an issue with the wireless network; the NetworkManager didn't manage the device. I thought something was wrong with the driver and followed the suggestion of blacklisting acer_wmi. Thus I made a file '/etc/modprobe.d/ath9k-blacklist.conf' with the line 'blacklist acer_wmi'. Then I realized that wlan0 was mentioned in the file /etc/network/interfaces, due, I guess, to the fact that I used the wireless interface during installation. I commented out all the related lines and the wireless network is now working. So, maybe blacklisting acer_wmi was not needed at all.

Contact Information

e-mail: mochan @ fis . unam . mx

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