This is a reluctant new purchase (it is a LOOOOONG story). Now that I am stuck with this laptop, I'd like to install (for dual boot) PCLinuxOS. Put the 2010.12 KDE live cd in tonight for test purposes....
I cannot get the sound or the touchpad to work. When I try to locate information on the system hardware it is spotty... I rebooted under Win7 (Yes I hate it) and the information provided is that this laptop has a Synaptics PS/2 Port Touchpad and is using some form of Realtek sound (Internal High Definition Audio Bus). Digging a little deeper it says that I am using an Intel HM55 Express chipset LPC Interface Controller - 3B09.
I searched the forums and installed kcm_touchpad and synaptiks. After logging out and back in (using live cd), there still is no information in Configure Your Desktop -> Hardware -> Input Devices about the touchpad. The only items listed are Keyboard, Mouse and Joystick. If I go to the Lost and Found it shows a Touchpad that when I select it says "Warning: Touchpad configuration is not supported on this system. The synaptics driver is either not loaded or too old. Refer to the documentation for information about the required driver version."
Received notification that "The audio playback device ALSA defaut output does not work. Falling back to ." PCC shows sound is configured to use snd_hda_intel [ALSA] with the only other driver as "unknown". Hardware under PCC shows my soundcard as 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio. In Phonon I have odd things happening. It shows HDA Intel (ALC275 Analog) and HDA Intel, INTEL HDMI 0 (HDMI Audio Output) [I'm not using the hdmi port so I'm guessing the Analog selection is needed). On this reboot these two output devices are not greyed out. They were prior. When I push the Test button... no sound comes out. The backend it is using (I'm guessing) shows to be XINE.
I understand that I have not installed the OS yet and I am hampered in trying to modify sound settings without being able to reboot properly. Is there a workaround to this?
Does anyone else with this hardware have sound and touchpad working? I've run alsaconf which Tex made reference to in another post with no luck. I still don't understand the touchpad issue. Surely the hardware in this machine is not that advanced that linux has not caught up with it (it does have a stupid fingerprint reader that I have no need for). Or maybe it is just what is on the 2010.12 CD. I am downloading another distro just to see if the problem is with PCLinuxOS or linux in general... I hope I'm not stuck with a machine with non-functional equipment....
Thanks for any help you can provide.
