# Acer Timeline 3830

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## 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).
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