Helios 500 on Ubuntu - Desperate for help

vigneshtv

Hi. I just bought a Helios 500 with i7 and installed Ubuntu in it and I am facing some issues along the way. Would be great if someone could help me out.

1) The special keys at the top (1-5) are bit detected in Ubuntu. I wanted to do some keyboard shortcut mappings. I tried with xev as well. I referred the guide here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LaptopSpecialKeys but every key has the same code and I am not sure how to do the keyboard mapping.

2) The speaker did not work initially and it said the headphone is always connected (i guess its due to improper pin mapping) - other people are also facing the same issue (https://forum.manjaro.org/t/acer-predator-helios-500-alc299-sound-card-no-sound/66344 and https://askubuntu.com/questions/1106006/in-audio-tab-its-shown-as-headphones-connected-while-it-is-not-in-ubuntu-18-04 and https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/09/02/acer-predator-helios-500-mods/ ). I tried using HDAJackRetask and can get the speaker working but not the headphones.

3) I am not sure how to configure the keyboard lighting in Ubuntu. Typically in devices like gaming mouse, the settings are written to mouse once configured and will work well irrespective of OS after config but does not seem to be the case here. I went to windows, set the lighting and rebooted to Linux, and all the lighting which I set is gone.

PS: The graphics driver had issues with secondary displays (with the default 390 which was suggested). But was fixed when I installed NVIDIA 415 drivers.

Acer, please give some love for Linux users. Thank you.

Red-Sand

Luckily for you @vanadium has already covered pretty much everything about Linux on the H500.

https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/09/02/acer-predator-helios-500-mods

vigneshtv

Red-Sand said:

Luckily for you @vanadium has already covered pretty much everything about Linux on the H500.

https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/09/02/acer-predator-helios-500-mods

His link is already there in my post. But the 3 problems are not yet solved there. Hence I asked here.

vanadium

keyboard shortcut works if you include CTRL. I did my mapping using CTRL + Fn. Audio jack is not working and I have no fix for this. Neither do I know how to configure keyboard lighting.

Unfortunately, the components used by Acer in this laptop doesn't play well with Linux. Seems like most aren't standard (like the sound card).

vigneshtv

vanadium said:

keyboard shortcut works if you include CTRL. I did my mapping using CTRL + Fn. Audio jack is not working and I have no fix for this. Neither do I know how to configure keyboard lighting.

Unfortunately, the components used by Acer in this laptop doesn't play well with Linux. Seems like most aren't standard (like the sound card).

Thanks for your reply and your blog - it was very useful. For me all the keyboard shortcuts work except the special keys at top left (P followed by 1-5 as shown in the screenshot below) - Are these special keys working for you?



I will reach out to Acer support as well. Rather than getting no as an answer it would be great if they can suggest some way in which I can get these things working. 

Firewalker

FYI, I tried a couple linux distro's and the one I got everything working OOTB (except multigesture (3/4 fingers) support for the trackpad) is Manjaro KDE.
You could give that a spin if you like to experiment/ distro hop/ try out new stuff ;-)

Order_66

I can't speak for the 500 but I had some of the same issues with my helios 300 and the latest kernel 4.20.3 fixed all of them at once.
If you update to 4.20.3 I wouldn't update the kernel anymore after that if everything is working properly, if the latest doesn't work for you then just hold the space key during boot and select the older kernel to boot from, then you can delete the kernel that was causing trouble after you've booted into linux.

sri369

@vigneshtv
One suggestion... Load a live usb runnable version of Linux and see if you are able to get it running, and if you can all hardware working, before you can replace the existing OS.

sri369

Firewalker said:

FYI, I tried a couple linux distro's and the one I got everything working OOTB (except multigesture (3/4 fingers) support for the trackpad) is Manjaro KDE.
You could give that a spin if you like to experiment/ distro hop/ try out new stuff ;-)

Check if the below link can help enable the advanced features.
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/549192/solution-enabling-touchpad-advanced-features-on-non-windows-10-os-on-g3-572

vigneshtv

Firewalker said:

FYI, I tried a couple linux distro's and the one I got everything working OOTB (except multigesture (3/4 fingers) support for the trackpad) is Manjaro KDE.
You could give that a spin if you like to experiment/ distro hop/ try out new stuff ;-)

Will try it and see if that works. Thanks.

vigneshtv

Order_66 said:

I can't speak for the 500 but I had some of the same issues with my helios 300 and the latest kernel 4.20.3 fixed all of them at once.
If you update to 4.20.3 I wouldn't update the kernel anymore after that if everything is working properly, if the latest doesn't work for you then just hold the space key during boot and select the older kernel to boot from, then you can delete the kernel that was causing trouble after you've booted into linux.

Interesting. Will try it and see if a kernel upgrade fixes it. Tried using Ukuu - it does not list 4.20.3 - will try to download and install it manually.

Sfinx

AMD version (P61) do not work under Ubuntu me due to several show stoppers:

- it boots randomly to 500Mhz CPU speed (!) without any chance to set it back to normal ranges
- resume from suspend will give you garbage at screen
- sound works only using hijack but without subwoofer
- any screen blank will give you 500Mhz CPU speed without any chance to set it back to normal ranges

Acer do not care about Linux users for predator line - you have to live with this.

vigneshtv

There is an interesting behavior I see on point number 3 - Looks like the keyboard lighting is written to the device once configured but the settings are not loaded when booting into ubuntu by default - you have to press the keyboard lightining button in the keyboard and toggle it on and off once to get the keyboard lighting which you have set loaded and you get the same lighting you set in windows.

quadcricket

Sfinx said:

AMD version (P61) do not work under Ubuntu me due to several show stoppers:

- it boots randomly to 500Mhz CPU speed (!) without any chance to set it back to normal ranges
- resume from suspend will give you garbage at screen
- sound works only using hijack but without subwoofer
- any screen blank will give you 500Mhz CPU speed without any chance to set it back to normal ranges

Acer do not care about Linux users for predator line - you have to live with this.

You can reset the CPU speed from 500mhz to normal by unplugging and replugging in the power cable. Resume/Suspend is being looked into by kernel developers. It is slowly getting better. I just wish it was tested for Linux compatibility before launch.