Ubuntu – Is hardware support for the Lenovo G580 laptop really that bad

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I am planing to buy a Lenovo G580 (59-324061) laptop. I found it is the best laptop in that price range. However, if I Google it for support in Ubuntu, I see many people complaining about driver problems with Ubuntu 12.04. I've read about wired network problems and brightness control issues with Ubuntu 12.04.

Is it really that bad?

Best Answer

The driver problem for the Atheros AR8162 network card in the Lenovo G580 was solved in the latest Ubuntu 12.04 point release (12.04.2, 14 Feb 2013). The LTS Enablement Stack introduced in that release will pull in Linux kernel 3.5.0 from Quantal, which has built-in support for the alx driver.

For those currently on 12.04: updating to 12.04.2 will not automatically enable the LTS Enablement Stack. You must install the package linux-generic-lts-quantal to do that.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get an Atheros AR8131 ethernet card working

I was having occasional drop-out issues with my Atheros AR8131 ethernet and found that an updated alx kernel driver was released by Qualcomm and works perfectly.

Note: This alx driver will not be included in the kernel however the code will eventually find its way into the current atl1c kernel driver.

alx Ethernet Driver

Remove current atl1c module and blacklist it:

rmmod atl1c

Add the line blacklist atl1c to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Download the driver tarball and extract it.
Install by executing these commands in the extracted driver directory:
```
./scripts/driver-select alx
make
sudo make install
```

Verify module installed with:

lspci -v

Kernel driver in use: alx
Kernel modules: alx

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to get an Atheros AR8131 ethernet card working

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