last update: 22 August 2004

In this document I will try to keep track of the things I've done to make Linux work well on this notebook. Initially I installed Fedora Core 1 on it, but that didn't recognise the ethernet driver, so I decided to try Fedora Core 2 (kernel 2.6.5-1.358), to see if that was any better, and it seemed to recognise it, but then actually didn't.

Initially the machine comes with a partition of 40Gb set to Windows XP Home edition, that I reduced to 15Gb using Knoppix. I used the remaining 45Gb for Linux. The machine comes with 512Mb Memory, but I upgraded one 256simm to 512, and now have 750+ Mb.

The documentation with the machine is very basic and doesn't list chipsets used in the peripherals. So quite a few of the following are rather generic.

The following table is partly taken from Debian Sarge on the Acer Aspire 2012 WLMi (local copy)

Ethernet

Network card is the Broadcom BCM4401. Fedora recognised and installed it as the b44 module, but that didn't work. But Broadcom provide the Linux Driver for it, which did work. Choose the Linux one in the BCM4401 listing. Now my "lsmod" shows a "bcm4400" module and it works well.

Haven't tried installing the BIOS upgrade yet. Am wondering whether to do that. BIOS seems strangely minimal, with not really that many options to enable/disable, only a few simple screens reporting the discovered hardware. Most issues are being left to the OS instead it seems.

That's for now what I've set up and I have a fairly ok working laptop. I will report in more detail the rest of the hardware soon.

Nice about this machine:

Wide screen, 15.4" widescreen WXGA colour TFT LCD with 1280 x 800 pixel, although I'm currently offered a maximum of 1024x768
Seems quite robust, and is elevated, which is good for keeping it cool (was a problem with my previous HP laptop)
three USB ports
CD writer

Less nice things:
The "home" and "end" keys require pressing Fn and then PgUp or PgDn. I use these keys quite a lot as I do a lot of commandline handling and therefore re-edit previous commandlines a lot and in practical daly use I have found this to be a little bit of an annoyance.

If you're interested you can check the dmesg and lsmod

The bios has no APM, so ACPI is the only option available. Initially having enabled ACPI in the control panel (kcontrol) didn't solve it as easily as I'd hoped. Unplugging the machine from power shuts it down immediately. Someone sent me a link that may be the place to start to solve it, http://gentoo-wiki.com/Gentoo_Acer_Travelmate_803LCi_Manual#Important_things_to_know_about_the_ACER_Travelmate_803_LCi 

I generally use KDE, and found it is a problem with KDE, more than with battery management. When using Gnome, it all works fine. KDE for some reason gets a "0.00 minutes left" even if the battery is at 98% and therefore powers down immediately. I haven't found yet why it does that, but it's annoying, because I like KDE better than Gnome, but as I write this I'm using Gnome, and am running on batteries, and it's all ok.

A quick search for KDE bugs finds quite a few: http://bugs.kde.org/simple_search.cgi?id=acpi
I suspect my problem is related to this one: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67427
I need to check this out more to solve it as I'd like to get back to KDE.

Other useful links:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Battery-Powered.html
http://acpi.sf.net

And browsing around there's loads of docs to find.
So now, the only thing left is tweaking it to last as long as possible when on the road, but at least I can run from batteries, which is already a step forward. I also need to figure out why KDE thinks the battery is flat when it isn't.

Also, a quick check found that suspend/hibernate doesn't come back up, so there's probably some process/driver that's not set up correctly to resume after suspend, and some more investigation is needed. Doing a normal shutdown/startup will be necessary for the time being.

PCMCIA

I put a modem in the PCMCIA slot (there is only one) and the kernel found it and installed it on /dev/ttyS1. I didn't try it, but I presume that's all working fine.

IrDA

At this stage I'm investigating what's going on, and found this: http://irda.sourceforge.net/smcinit/ It seems to only be a problem for 2.4 kernels, and I'm running 2.6 but a quick check found that Fedora doesn't include the smc-ircc driver, even as a module, so I'll need to start recompiling the kernel.

For now I have a machine that does what I need to do, but there are loads of things to resolve. I hope to get around to that at some point and will gradually update this document. Lack of time stops me from sorting it out immediately.

If you have some more information to add here, let me know