Re: notebook choice advice...
On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 03:36:08PM +0200, Frederik Schueler wrote:
> I have an acer wlmi 5024.
>
> - installer with 2.6.8 took ~1h to format the drive: atiixp ide chipset
> is not recognised -> no DMA (formatting 80GB in PIO4 mode is _slow_).
ATI seems so far to have pretty awful support in general.
> - apic throws lots of errors, needs to boot with noapic
> - acpi is pretty broken: only ac, lid and pwr buttons work, thermal
> zones and battery status do not. With a patched 2.6.11+acpi the
> thermal zones work, but still no batitery. 2.6.12+acpi breaks thermal
> again. At least the display backlight gets powered off when closing
> the lid.
>
> - the keyboard gets lost during boot, and reappears after pressing some
> keys while closing and reopening the lid a couple of times (this did
> not happen with 2.6.8).
>
> - the psmouse module needs to be rmmodded and modprobed again after
> the keyboard was found.
>
> - 1280x800 15.4" display has 75dpi (no magnifying glasses needed ;-),
> and works like a charm with proprietaray ati drivers. Not tested
> 3D games yet, but according to glxinfo it should be accelerated.
> - gbit lan works
> - sound works
> - cpufreq works (800, 1600, 1800MHz states)
> - the touchpad works good with synaptic driver.
>
> - wavelan: broadcom unknown device, not tested yet due to missing
> infrastructure. Will presumably need a windos x64 dll loaded by
> ndiswrapper.
I believe the broadcom wireless chips are known to work with ndiswrapper
and the 64bit windows drivers.
> - the dvd rw did not like the DVDs I tried to watch with it, xine had
> problems decrypting some of the VOBs on the disk (error in libcss).
At least dvd+rw drives in general work fine with growisofs (for DVD) and
cdrecord (for CD). libcss is probably not even included in debian, but
I think xine has a readme in /usr/share/doc/xine/ that says how to get
it.
> not tested yet:
>
> writing DVDs, irda, bluetooth, svideo-out, usb, pcmcia, firewire, card
> reader (damn thing has no CF slot), internal modem
The card reader built in to a laptop is almost always a TI part in my
experience, and TI has no intensions at all it seems of getting any
support for it outside windows.
> from a users point of view, this box is pretty broken and should just
> be returned to the vendor.
>
> from my point of view, I am having fun fixing this, but some things are
> really annoying and I hope to find fixes soon.
Len Sorensen
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