RSS 0.91 FeedFedora Core on Acer Travelmate 8000
Last update: 14.12.2006
If one has any further questions about this machine or its configuration, I will try to answer them. Please take into consideration that it is not my notebook I'm describing here. I only make the technical support for it. If I have to try something out on it, it can take a week or two. I cannot guarantee, that my answers will solve any of your problems 
. My email adress is adalbert.prokop@gmx.de.
Please note that I'm not a native speaker. If my english sounds wooden or funny - amuse youself as much as you like and send me a note how to fix it later on. ;-)
 Top view on the keyboard (Click to enlarge) |
 Top view with closed lid |
Overview
The measures taken from the user's manual are 331.5×280.7×33.2 mm (13.1×11.1×1.3 inches for you non-metrics ;-)). The weight is 2.88 kg (6.33 lbs).
The notebook is completely black, has a 15" SXGA+ display, touchpad with two buttons and an additional button, which can be pushed in four different directions. It generates mouse clicks of buttons 3 - 6. It has two speakers of average quality, built-in microphone, USB, FireWire (IEEE 1394), four quick launch buttons and integrated card readers which probably won't work together with Linux.
There are three LEDs over the keyboard which show the status of CapsLock and NumLock keys and hard drive activity. On the front edge there is a power and a battery LED as well as two activity LEDs for Bluetooth and wireless LAN. The latest ipw2200 WLAN driver supports this LED if you load it with the option led=1. Bluetooth seems to be somewhat more hardwired, because it flashes after beeing switched on.
This laptop uses ACPI, which is supported by kernel 2.6. It means for example that pressing the power button won't simply switch your machine off but send an event to you operating system which can shutdown the system cleanly. I've seen three kind of button events:
- power button,
- lid button,
- sleep button.
In Fedora Core 6 only the power button has an assigned functions by default. Other buttons can be programmend as you like. See the documentation of acpid
Hardware
| Type | Acer TravelMate 8002LCI |
| CPU | Intel® Pentium® M 1500 (Centrino™) |
| BIOS | Phoenix First BIOS Notebook Pro Version 2.0, V.3A14, Build 04/20/04 |
| Chipset | Intel® 855GME Chipsatz; 400MHz Front-Side-Bus |
| WLAN | Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG (802.11b/g) |
| Cache | 1 MB |
| Memory | 512MB SD-RAM (non-shared!) |
| Display | 15" TFT-SXGA+, 1400×1050 / 32 bbp / 60 Hz VGA and DVI-D connectors for external displays |
| Graphics | ATI RadeonMobility 9700, 128MB, 3D accelerated |
| Audio | Intel 82801DB (AC'97 compatible) |
| Media | 80 GB EIDE hard drive (Toshiba MK6021GAS), QSI CD-RW/DVD-ROM SBW242C SD/MMC/MS/SM card reader (currently unsable with Linux) SmartCard slot (currently unsable with Linux) |
| Interfaces |
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- Modem connector
- LAN connector
- Port replicator connector
- DVI-D
- VGA
- S-Video
- Loudspeaker
- MMC/SD card reader
- MMC/SD card activity LED
- FIR port
- Bluetooth activity LED
- Bluetooth switch
- WLAN activity LED
- WLAN switch
- USB
- FireWire
- PCMCIA (PC-Card)
- SmartCard
- Line in
- Microphone
- Headphones out
- Power
- Mail (with LED)
- Browser
- User defined button 1
- User defined button 2
- CapsLock LED
- NumLock LED
- Hard drive/CD activity
- CD-ROM bay lock
- Battery
- Battery lock
- Name label
- Hard drive shock protection
Linux installation
Distribution
I have installed Fedora Core 6 and use the original Fedora kernel. This kernel has no support for NTFS filesystems. The ntfs-3g package (a part of the extras-repository) has a User-Space driver for NTFS.
The installation worked without problems.
Graphics
Fedora Core 6 uses the VESA driver on the ATI card by default. It works, but is not very fast. Fortunately, ATI provides an accelerated driver for Linux. Unfortunately, the configuration of this driver is a little bit tricky.
You do not need the kernel source code any more to compile the driver. ATI's installer package generates a RPM package which can be easily installed. After the installation I've encountered some problems:
- When running on battery the display becomes blank for a fraction of a second. This behaviour repeats at random intervals, which vary somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes.
- Sometimes when you switch to a text console the computer freezes. This also can happen if you just log out, because then the machine switches to a text console for a short time. This bug has been probably fixed in the newest ATI driver version 8.32.5 from December 13, 2006. At least I could log in and out about 10 times in a row.
- Driver 8.40.4 from August 13, 2007 causes a simmilar problem. Everytime the X-Server is resettet or restarted, it hangs. Unfortunatelly it makes only one login possible.
In xorg.conf you should replace the line with
Driver "vesa"
with
Driver "fglrx"
to load the accelerated driver next time the X server starts up.
For the 3D acceleration to work you need another section in the config file.
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection
Without it your graphics won't be accelerated. Here is my xorg.conf, if you are interested.
Sound
Generaly, it works.
It did not any quality test with the built-in microphone or an external one. I simply hope, they work as well as the external speakers and the earphones do.
Ethernet
The tg3 module was loaded atomatically and works perfectly on 100 Mb ethernet. I did not test it on 10 Mb or 1000 Mb ethernet in lack of proper infrastructure.
WLAN
There are drivers for the Intel Pro Wireless 2200 WLAN card. You can find the sources at http://ipw2200.sf.net/. The ipw2200 driver is now officialy a part of the kernel, you do not have to compile it yourself. But you will need the firmware, which is linked on the same location. The firmware files must be placed in /lib/firmware.
This WLAN card is not a PC card. The system refers to it as to an PCI device. Add an alias definition to your /etc/modprobe.conf file, to make sure the module will be loader at boot time.
alias eth1 ipw2200
If you want the LED to show your WiFi activity you have to load the module with led=1 option. This line in /etc/modprobe.conf will do the trick.
option ipw2200 led=1
I use a small script wlanscanner which I have writte myself to scan the aether for available WiFi networks and joining them. The extras repository of Fedora Core 6 provides two other tools, which allow the scanning and managing of WiFi networks. Those are
- wifi-radar and
- wifiroamd.
I am successfully using wifiroamd on another notebook and I cannot say anything about wifi-radar.
Modem
In theory, there are Linux drivers for the Intel modem chipset. In lack of real need, I never tried them. Have a look at http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/, which is a prominent site for drivers and information for on winmodems on linux.
Quick launch buttons
These buttons can also be used with Linux and can be given arbitrary user defined functions. To get advantage of those buttons you can use a small perl tool omke.pl from http://sourceforge.net/projects/omke/. It can activate those buttons although it doesn't mean you can use them at once. Put the call to omke.pl in your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file to activate your quick launch buttons at boot time. Maybe you can use Péter Soós' omnibook driver, which also offers the activations of quick launch buttons along with other interesting and usefull information. It can also be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/omke/. It's a suggestion, feel free to find out.
Once those buttons are activated, one has to make them work with X, which cannot understand the created scancodes nativly. There is a project calledLinux support for Easy Access and Internet Keyboards which can manage those keycodes and execute prefined actions. Here are examples of my configuration files lineakd.conf and lineakkb.def.
To get those keys working you have to set the keycodes first. If you don't, you will simply get a message in your syslog about a key with unknown keycode. The following lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local will set the keycodes at every boot.
setkeycodes e074 239 # User1 button setkeycodes e073 238 # User2 button setkeycodes e055 234 # WLAN on setkeycodes e056 227 # WLAN off setkeycodes e057 228 # Bluetooth on setkeycodes e058 229 # Bluetooth off setkeycodes e025 205 # Help setkeycodes e026 154 # Setup setkeycodes e027 199 # Energy scheme
FireWire
Cannot test it, because I've got no devices...
USB
High speed USB, working out of the box.
External CRT
Works. ;-) The Fn+F5 key shortcut switches around the following modes:
- CRT
- LCD+CRT
- LCD
S-Video
One can switch between the TFT and S-Video with the keys Fn+F5. The screen resolution shoud be adjusted to 800×600 pixel for a "normal" TV output.
The S-Video adaptor is not compatible with the common composite cinch adaptor! S-Video transfers luminosity (brightness) and chrominance (color intensity) seperately. A composite signal is composed of both pieces of information. Most adaptors from S-Video to cinch use the luminosity and leave chroma unused. The result is an black'n'white image. Unfortunately, one can't simply connect luminosity and chrominance, that would result in a short-circuit.
If you don't want to spend money for a prefabricated S-Video to composite adapter, ask Google for the cable FAQ. There you can find a manual for a self made adapter.
Suspend-to-disk
I made some tests with the suspend-to-disk function. I only succeeded in runlevel 3, without runnig X. In runlevel 5, with X, the system suspended but froze after restoring. Some drivers hindered my system from sleeping in, so I had to get rid of PCMCIA and USB modules before suspending.
Specials
Very nice and quite laptop. The CPU fan seldom has something to do and it can hardly be heard. Comfortable keyboard - except for END and HOME keys, which are only reachable as combinations with Fn.
When running on battery the display becomes blank for a fraction of a second. This behaviour repeats at random intervals, which vary somewhere between 30 seconds and 3 minutes.
Sometimes when you switch to a text console the computer freezes. This also can happen if you just log out, because then the machine switches to a text console for a short time. This bug has been probably fixed in the newest ATI driver version 8.32.5 from December 13, 2006. At least I could log in and out about 10 times in a row.
Fedora Core 2 does not use the XFree86 X-Server any more for licensing reasons. Instead they have the GNU project Xorg. Unfortunately KDE tries to load keyboard layouts from the XFree86 project, which do not exist. You can fix this problem by creating this links in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules
ln -s xorg xfree86 ln -s xorg.lst xfree86.lst ln -s xorg.xml xfree86.xml
Last change on: Sunday, 5. October 2008, 22:48:51