Re: linux on an Acer TravelMate 800
On 05.04.2004 13:09 Luis Mendes wrote:
Hi all,
I am about to buy a new laptop and after searching a couple of different
brands I came across the Acer TravelMate 800 series which has most of
the features I am looking for. Has anyone on this list got any
experience with this laptop? I am planing to install Debian on it as I
have done on the laptop I am using at the moment. I checked mobilix and
linux-on-laptops and it seems that most of the hardware works fine under
linux. I am a bit suspicious with the price since this is by far the
cheapest laptop with these specs I could find. The next one up is almost
£500 more expensive... (at least in the uk...)
I have an Acer Travelmate 803LmiB running with Debian sid and Kernel
2.6. I think mostly everything works with it. I can adjust the CPU
frequency, use the Wireless LAN, burn DVDs, use most of the Fn keys,
even Suspend to disk works (but not yet Suspend to RAM). I think
Bluetooth and IrDA works as well, but I couldn't test it yet.
A really good notebook.
For WLAN I use currently the open source software ndiswrapper.
To get the Ethernet Card to work, you should not use Debian woody,
because the kernel version is too old for it. Furthermore Debian woody
does not come with XFree86 4.3 which supports the ATI Mobility Radeon
Graphics Card. So to avoid serious trouble, I would recommend to take a
Live CD like Gnoppix (which is based on woody and takes only backports)
or Morphix (which is based on unstable as far as I remember) and start
from there with a harddisk installation. I took Gnoppix and upgraded to
unstable.
The fan is very noisy once it runs. I use the software cpuspeed[1] to
adjust the CPU frequency dynamically, because the commonly used cpufreqd
and cpudynd didn't work as expected -- then the fan does not turn on.
To raise or lower the sound, I got the tool "acme" to work with my
appropriate Fn keys.
The only minor problem that I currently run into is, that the tapping on
the touchpad does not work under kernel 2.6 but with kernel 2.4. I
didn't have time to figure out what's the problem even if it is a bit
annoying.
Any more question?
Martin
[1] http://carlthompson.net/Software/CPUSpeed
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