My new Acer TM 512T
For all of you who wondered if I actually did buy something.......
How I bought my Acer Travelmate 512T
After seven weeks of grueling summer classes (teaching them, not taking
them) I thought about treating myself to something nice: so I bought a
notebook. I had been researching the subject for about 6 months already and
after I helped a friend buy an Acer Travelmate 331T I found the quality
good enough to buy an Acer myself too.
I settled for the Travelmate 512T because I wanted an all-in-one design. It
has nice speakers on the front and a very intuitive keyboard. I read up on
the compatibility with Linux and it seemed not too bad bearing in mind that
with Linux you always have to spend a considerable amount of time before
you got a system running the way you want it.
So I went to the shop and first negotiated a good price with the owner
(remember, I bought it in Taiwan). I paid exactly US$1500 for the basic
machine, upgraded the RAM from 32 to 96 MB for US$78, decided not to
upgrade to a 6.4 GB hard drive because the machine came with a 4.6 GB hard
drive - and not the 4.0 GB as advertised - and I also bought a D-Link card
bus Ethernet card for US$56.
When I told the owner that I wanted to revoke the MS Windows license he
said almost nobody did that. But in the end he accepted the fact that I had
no use for it (the machine came with traditional Chinese Windows 98) and so
he gave me a refund of US$30.
I then settled down at a table in the back of the shop with the machine,
booted the Debian 2.1 CD-ROM and partitioned the hard disk. I installed the
base system, but at reboot the PCMCIA hung the machine. As I have no
experience with PCMCIA I decided to buy a D-Link Ethernet card which was on
the supported card list and take it home and experiment with it later. I
then changed /etc/init.d/pcmcia to /etc/init.d/x-pcmcia and the machine
booted fine.
To have some feel of achievement I then decided to see if I could get X
working. I installed the debs necessary and ran XF86Setup. The touchpad was
a simply PS/2 mouse, as server I choose the standard SVGA and as monitor
something that could to 800x600 at 60Hz. The server came up only the
desktop was four times too big, i.o.w. I saw the lower-left part of the
desktop stretched over the entire LCD with a huge "Start" button from
fvwm95. I checked the /etc/XF86Config and that file was full of "320x204"
resolutions, nothing else. I changed them all to "640x480" but no luck.
Funny thing was that the moment I got X running there were four guys gazing
over my shoulder at the wonders I was performing. Linux is not big in
Taiwan yet, but it is gaining momentum with a new Linux magazine in Chinese
just launched (July 99) and Chinese versions of Linux out. They were very
interested, we had a nice discussion about the merits of Linux and I showed
them some things you could do from the console.
I had been sitting there for more than 2 hours, so I decided that it was
enough and I headed home. I may not have succeeded in much besides
installing a base system, but I am a patient man and the fun thing about
Linux for me is the problem solving part and the sense of achievement you
get from that.
Next things to do:
- make a list of all the hardware specs
- upgrade the kernel to 2.2.10
- get pcmcia working
- get X working (NeoMagic MagicMedia256AV. I got the right driver from
RedHat's ftp site - XFCom-neomagic-glibc-2_0_0-1_i386.tgz - but no luck in
installing them. Still "320x204")
Hans
P.S. I hope to expand the above and make it into a web page one of these days.
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