Acer V3-372 with LInux Kernel 4.4 - stable?

I upgraded to kernel 4.4-rc4 and so far things are working great. I even re-enabled pstate and everything has been stable so far.

Also contributing to stability is that I have stopped using the buggy Asus wifi dongle and started using my Nexus 5 with USB tethering.

I determined a lot of the Steam crashes were due to crashed wifi.

Everything has been running great for 3 days now. I hope this works out. Tomorrow the Intel wifi card arrives which should mean the laptop will be finally fully functional!

Acer V3-372 WiFi Backup Plan with RTL8192cu

My $2 USB wifi adapter arrived a few days ago. At first I was very disappointed as the speed was excruciatingly slow.

I learned that this was due to poor hardware crypto performance. A simple swenc=1 option in module load up fixed it.

While I believe it is possible to compile a driver for the QCA6174 wireless module, I think this is likely to be more hassle than it is worth and so I ordered an Intel 7265n wifi card until the Qualcomm card gets mainline support.

QCA6174 Linux WiFi Support ath10k

The drivers in the Debian 4.2 and 4.3 kernels do not currently work reliably with the QCA6174 card even with the latest WiFi card firmware.

I have seen some proposed kernel patches and will see if I can get an externally built module to work.

I am hoping that there will be kernel support soon as even if it does work, maintaining an out of tree driver will be a pain.

For now, I am using an external USB wifi dongle .In the worst case, I can replace the wifi card with a better supported one, but I find that a non-working wifi card isn't as big a problem as I thought because:

• I can use wired lan
• When I am on the move, I anyway USB tether to my phone which has a wireless plan
• I can use a USB wifi dongle

Getting Linux (Debian) Running on the Acer V3-372 Skylake Laptop

This post is being written on the Acer V3-372 laptop running Debian, so I have had some degree of success in getting it to work, but it is not perfect.

I'm documenting this as a reminder and to help anyone else who is stuck trying to get this to work.

Legacy BIOS

• I didn't try to install using UEFI, I switched the BIOS to legacy boot.
• You can get into BIOS by pressing F2 on boot
• While you are there, you can change the Touchpad setting to 'Basic'

Installation

• Installation from USB stick worked fine

Graphics crash

• First problem is hanging when switching to graphics mode. To avoid this put in the file /etc/default/grub the line:
• GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 i915.modeset=1 acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
• run "update_grub" to apply the settings

Touchpad

• To get this to work, make sure the touchpad is set to "Basic" in the BIOS
• Then also press Fn-F7 to enable the touchpad

Backlight

• This should work if you added the options: "acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" to the kernel options.

Wifi

• I have not yet managed to get WiFi to work.