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nigelhannam
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 11:02 am    Post subject: Acer Aspire 1500 / Gentoo 2004.0 experiences Reply with quote

I bought an Acer Aspire 1502LMi last week,and seing as I haven't found any other comments about it, I thought I'd write a few comments about my experience installing gentoo.

The install was from stage 1 on the 2004.0 amd64 cds.

The install went pretty well after I read the post about MAKEDEV needing to be run after chrooting. I ran the bootstrap-2.6.sh script, and everything went fine.

I thought I'd use genkernel to build the kernel as it's not something that I've used before. I used the standard kernel-config-2.6, and it generates a kernel that happily boots. (no need for any extra kernel option passing so far).

Current state of affairs is:
The integrated Broadcom NIC works with the bcm5700 module.
Powernow features work great with cpudyn
PCMCIA sockets work fine - I've got my prism54 based wireless card working.
Soundcard seems to work ok under alsa - snd_via82xx

xfree-4.3.99.902-r2 works fine with the radeon driver. I have not yet been able to get the synaptics touchpad to recognise taps yet, but it's not something I've had working before - need to do a bit of reading.

Not tried USB / firewire / cdr / modem
Pretty sure I'm not gonna get anywhere with the Broadcom wireless.

Overall I'm pretty happy that I have a functioning 64bit laptop.
I seem to have a minor issue with the keyboard. Its a UK layout, and although all everything else appears ok, the pound sign (ie pounds sterling) does not appear to work quite right. Think I need to look into that one a bit more because it seems to behave differently under different circumstances. (ie sometimes I get an accented u, other times nothing, other times the actual pound sign).

Minor issues during install:
blackdown-jre built and installed, but failed to work. Appeared to be a classpath / install location issue (java -version failed complaining it wasn't able to find java/lang/Object)
blackdown-jdk does work though.

When installing gnome, cdrtools failed to compile. Followed a suggestion I found on the forums about temporarily removing the /usr/src/linux symlink, and that fixed the compilation problem.
Also during gnome install, the stable epiphany failed to build due to the fact that it was incompatible with mozilla 1.6. I installed epiphany-1.0.7 instead.


Last edited by nigelhannam on Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Aggamemnon
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi

What did you do to get the Synaptics pad to work? I'm having trouble with mine.

EDIT: Fixed that

What Radeon drivers did you use? I've set XFree to use VESA for the moment.
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nigelhannam
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sorry, maybe I need to clarify that a bit:

The touchpad is currently only working as a standard PS2 mouse. It did this without any special steps - XF86Config is setup pointing to /dev/mouse using protocol "auto".

What I HAVEN'T got working is anything synaptics specific. i.e. scrolling / taps etc.
I've never bothered trying to get this stuff working before, but will probably persist with this laptop. I think I just need to learn how to configure it properly.

<edit>
The graphics card is configured to use the radeon drivers that are part of the xfree-4.3.99.902 build. I'd read that these drivers ONLY work in that build.xfree-4.3.99.902-r2
I just merged that specific version of xfree and changed the driver in XF86Config to "radeon".
I'm not currently thinking about any 3d acceleration, as this is going to be primarily a work tool.
</edit>
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vyzivus
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 10:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is simple: just do
Code:
emerge synaptics
then add the following to your xorg.conf:
Code:
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier    "TouchPad"
        Driver        "synaptics"
        Option        "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
        Option        "LeftEdge"      "1700"
        Option        "RightEdge"     "5300"
        Option        "TopEdge"       "1700"
        Option        "BottomEdge"    "4200"
        Option        "FingerLow"     "25"
        Option        "FingerHigh"    "30"
        Option        "MaxTapTime"    "180"
        Option        "MaxTapMove"    "220"
        Option        "VertScrollDelta" "100"
        Option        "MinSpeed"      "0.06"
        Option        "MaxSpeed"      "0.12"
        Option        "AccelFactor" "0.0010"
        Option        "SHMConfig"     "on"
EndSection

and to use it, add
Code:

        InputDevice    "TouchPad" "SendCoreEvents"

to the ServerLayout section.
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nigelhannam
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 1:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Looks pretty much like what I did in the end, but I forgot to come back and update this thread.

At the time that I wrote it originally, the synaptics driver was not working on amd64 with the version of xfree that I was using (the X server would just crash at startup).

I am currently using:

x11-misc/synaptics-0.13.6
and x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3

without any problems.
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xonner
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 3:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have an Acer 1502LMi and i'm having problems with the wireless card.
Can you tell me please how did u get the wireless card to work? Thanks!

I have no problems with the network ethernet card.
lspci:
Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5788 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 03)

My wireless card:
lspci:
Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)

iwconfig:
eth0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

When i tried with linux-wlan-ng i get this:
gentux default # wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng: No such device

uname -a:
Linux gentux 2.6.9-gentoo-r14 #16 SMP Wed Mar 30 01:01:19 WEST 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

lsmod:
Code:

Module                  Size  Used by
prism2_usb             74372  0
ds                     18188  4
yenta_socket           18560  0
pcmcia_core            58768  2 ds,yenta_socket
prism2_pci             71040  0
p80211                 31640  2 prism2_usb,prism2_pci
snd_ioctl32            26496  0
snd_pcm_oss            52392  0
snd_mixer_oss          17536  2 snd_pcm_oss
snd_seq_oss            34752  0
snd_seq_midi_event      7872  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq                54976  4 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_via82xx            25180  2
snd_ac97_codec         79504  1 snd_via82xx
snd_pcm                86344  4 snd_ioctl32,snd_pcm_oss,snd_via82xx,snd_ac97_codec
snd_timer              22152  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc          9488  2 snd_via82xx,snd_pcm
snd_mpu401_uart         7552  1 snd_via82xx
snd_rawmidi            22592  1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device          8400  3 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_rawmidi
snd                    50504  14 snd_ioctl32,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_via82xx,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
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nigelhannam
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 5:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I did not have the patience to wait for the wireless issues to be resolved, so replaced the minipci card with one that works with the prism54 driver.

I think others have recently reported some luck using linuxant driverloader or ndiswrapper, but as far as I know there is still no native linux driver for the broadcom wireless card.
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frocksii
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 09, 2005 8:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can get the wifi card working with ndiswrapper (version 1 or higher) and some broadcom 64-bit windows driver.
I did it here. There another topic on Acer Aspire 1501 / 1511 somewhere in this AMD64 forum that has information over
al the issues with 15xx models.

frocksii
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xonner
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2005 12:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I tried with the ndiwrapper and it works like a charm. :D You just have to download ndiswrapper and get the drivers from windows.
Check this post for more details, it helped me a lot.
Thanks for the help.

Xonner
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CodAv
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 9:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've also got an Acer Aspire 1501 running in 32-Bit mode, but my Broadcom WLAN card won't work with ndiswrapper, since I can't get it powered up. I tried activating it permanently using the Windows control panel, but at the moment I load the ndiswrapper driver, the card's power goes off... duh.
I also tried a Netgear WG511 rev. 2 (Taiwan Model), which worked for a while, but then, when I really needed it, it stopped working after an emerge -u world. Trying to get a D-Link G650 (Atheros) working with mad-wifi failed, too.

Any ideas? Am I that stupid, or is my whole Gentoo messed up?
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ChipChopChippy
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 9:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is there a howto on replacing the mini-pci card in the aspire 15xx series laptops? I have a 1524 which is distinctly wired......
What model mini-pci cards are people using?
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dangertools
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 9:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

usually 90% of all laptops have broadcom based mini-pci cards which aren't supported native but ndiswrapper can handle them quite welll under 32 and 64bit. if you need to make an AP of your laptop or you want to sniff your neighbors network you need something different, else those chips are working usually quite good, at least my aspire 1501Lmi has no problems with it. the thing with replacing is a bit difficult since you need to find a matching mini-pci card which is not as easy as one would think. If you really find one you have to open your machine and replace the card and then reconnect the antenna(s) to it. Hopefully it works
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ChipChopChippy
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 10:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

But.....the 1524 is not one of the 10%. It has an Inprocomm IPN2220 which, as far as I am aware, noone has got working on any 64-bit Linux distro. In my case [with this card] Ndiswrapper gives me a kernel panic, and Linuxant just doesn't work - so I don't really have a choice :cry:
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superbrain666
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 3:18 pm    Post subject: Working Good on 32bit Mode Reply with quote

I've started with the amd64 tree on April 2004 but it was too unstable an some nice tools like NdisWrapper or the Ati-Drivers weren't available at all.
Then i decided to reinstall with the x86 arch, which works good for me for nearly one year now, except two small things:
1) Ndiswrapper started and stopped its services from time to time. Thats no problem for me, because i'm wired nearly all the time.
Which Windows Driver do you use with NDISWRAPPER? The ACER Driver is not working neither on Winxp nor on Linux correctly.

2) The MMC/SD Reader from Winbond. I've tried to patch my kernel with the SD-Extensions from
DR Zeus but they doesn't work with my TOSHIBA-512MB SD. And I dont have any other to test.
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dangertools
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 3:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

on 64bit i use the only driver available for my wifi, the one from planetamd64.com, my cardreader works quite good with the patches from Pierre Ossman, no problems so far, have tested with MMC and SD, all cards (3) i have work without problems but also without DMA since Acer didn't connect the pin.
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superbrain666
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 6:05 pm    Post subject: Can you post some infos? Reply with quote

Can you post some more informations about your Kernel setup, depending on that Cardreader and NdisWrapper? Do you use Genkernel ? Do you use Udev?
It would help me much.
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dangertools
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 6:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i am using a vanilla 2.6.11.7 kernel, just patched with the patches from the wbsd project in the order wbsd, powercycle, bulk, mmc-sd, wbsd-sd. ndiswrapper is the one which is in portage, atm 1.1. the wbsd-driver is built into the kernel, same as mmc-block which is needed for wbsd to work. i am using udev. driver for ndiswrapper is the one from planetamd64, the wiki-list on ndiswrapper.sf.net holds a link, imho this is the only one out there. the wbsd-project holds a howto, with instructions how to patch the kernel etc. the order of the patches is important. my wireless configuration is done by the baselayoutscripts and wpa_supplicant. i don't think that there is further information. should be solvable

regards
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superbrain666
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I used 2.6.Z Gentoo-Sources formerly known as Gentoo-dev-sources, but next time ill try the vanillas too. That might fix some Problems
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