Please note: As of
today (1. Aug 2002) I no longer use/have this notebook. I've bought an
Apple iBook instead. Read about it in my journal here
if you want. This page will stay online as it is since it's a pretty
complete compendium about Linux on these laptops. I add things,
update this site and happily include contributed information from
others but I won't do any research on my own any more.
If you're looking for a really good and also not too
expensive notebook, do yourself a favour and buy an iBook. :)
This site describes the potential adventure that you may experience if
you install Linux on an Travelmate 210 series notebook. The
hardware in general is the same in all notebooks of the series. So
this guide can be applied to all 212T, 212TX or TXV, TXR models. See
the Acer webpage for differences of the specific models.
I am using a 212TX that now qualifies as TXV since I replaced the
standard CD-ROM drive with a DVD drive. If you're looking for cheap
parts for your Acer laptop (only in Germany however) be sure to check
out this list. Acer sells
quite interesting (mostly slighlty aged) things for a fair price.
This guide is not distribution specific. Personally I installed Slackware 8.0 on the computer, but every other distribution should be fine as well. However if the install is too automagically, like automatic XFree configuration, changes are higher that it doesn't work at once. The good news is, that every piece of hardware on this notebook except for the softmodem works. Time to remove those annoying "Designed for Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional / Windows® Me" stickers. ;^)
Philosophy of this document:
I don't explain too much of the basics here. You should know your
way around Linux a bit, know how to configure things in the
distribution you chose. This is primarily a collection of solutions to
problems that annoyed me until I found out how to solve them.
With that said let's go on and look how Windows is doing on the hard disk.
If you want to get rid of Windows completely just throw away the
partition with fdisk after you booted with your Linux CD/floppy or
use the distribution tools. If you want to have Windows and Linux
cooexisting on the disk it's a little bit more work.
The easiest way of doing this is with GNU parted. Go to the GNU parted webpage and
get a bootdisk image. Write the image to disk with rawrite for example
or just dd and boot the disk with your laptop. The software itself is self
explanatory. The online help explains everything you need. There is
also full documentation about the program on the parted webpage.
Parted will
warn you about an inconsistency in the partition table and partition
size. You can just ignore this warning and the program won't care any
more about it.
I got my Travelmate with a 10 GB disk installed. I splitted the disk
into a 7 GB partition where Windows remained and used 3 GB for the
Linux partition. I still have about a GB free under Linux and you can
use the Windows partition as storage under Linux as well. Of course
that's entirely your choise.
When you're done messing with the disk (this may take a while) you can
reboot with ctrl+alt+del. The OS will probably hang with "no more
processes left in this runlevel". Just switch it on and off.
Windows should then boot again from its shrinked partition. You can do
a scandisk under Windows to see if something broke. It shouldn't.
:^)
After that boot with your Linux bootCD or bootdisk and install. Read the next chapter about hardware, drivers and kernel configuration.
This list shows which hardware is in the notebook and which driver you'll have to use for it since it's not clear everytime which kernel driver is responsible. You can either load the desired kernel modules from your distribution or compile your own kernel along these guidelines. By the time of writing this I have the laptop running with Linux 2.4.17.
Be sure to activate Code maturity level options in the kernel config if you compile your own kernel. If you want to have my exakt kernel configuration, you can find the .config (kernel 2.4.17) I used here.
The computer has the following hardware (Travelmate 212TX). I provide a direct link to the piece of hardware on the manufaturer's website if I can find it:
keycode 153 = XF86Mail
keycode 144 = XF86WWW
keycode 171 = XF86Launch0
keycode 236 = XF86Launch1
Now you should be able to bind those keys to whatever action you
want in whatever windowmanager you use. If not type "xmodmap
~/.xmodmaprc" and put the command somewhere where it is
executed after X is started.
#!/bin/sh
/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap ~/.xmodmaprc
If you have different keycodes for the launchkeys (for whatever
reason), you can find them with the program "xev". Open
a terminal and start the program, move the mouse into the box
inside the program window and push the keys. You can get the
keycodes on xev's console output.
Below is a list of hardware that works flawlessly together with my notebook and Linux. If you're looking for something to add to your notebook, check out the list. If you have problems on your notebook with the listed hardware, please let me know.
Well, a fairly trivial task. You need to get at least XFree 4.1.0 for this. Earlier versions may work, but the driver is somewhat buggy. I wouldn't recommend XFree 3.3.6. You may read it everytime when someone tries to install X on a CyberBlade graphics chipset, but I didn't get it to work. 4.1.0 on the other hand worked flawlessly from the beginning. I updated to XFree 4.2.0 just today (Jan 20th 2002). It works pretty well and lots of bugs in the trident driver were fixed. I suggest getting the 4.2.0 release.
The computer uses a graphics chip that the kernel identifies as follows:
Bus 1, device 0, function 0:
VGA compatible controller: PCI device 1023:8620 (Trident Microsystems) (rev 93).
IRQ 11.
Master Capable. Latency=32.
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x80800000 [0x80ffffff].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x80100000 [0x8011ffff].
Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x81000000 [0x817fffff].
That's one way of saying "I have no idea what this is". ;^) XFree 4 knows the chip. It's a Trident CyberBlade/DSTN/Ai1 rev 93. This is an integrated graphics core. You find more information about it if you want on ALI's webpage. Well, the whole laptop is full of stuff from them.
You can get a running X server with the "trident" driver. The device section should read something like:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Trident Cyberblade A1i"
Driver "trident"
VideoRam 8192
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "SWCursor"
Option "CyberStretch"
EndSection
The option "SWCursor" is needed. You get a blinking square
of garbage on the screen as your cursor otherwise. It's kinda
difficult to click on things with it.
The option "CyberStretch" should stretch the display to full
screen when you're using 800x600 for example. Due to a bug in X pre
4.2.0 this didn't work. If you want to use this option, you'll need at
least XFree 4.2.0.
The monitor section is even easier:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Digital Flatpanel (1024x768)"
HorizSync 31.5 - 60
VertRefresh 60
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
This way the panel will be accessed with 60 Hz only. I have no idea if the panel is 60 Hz or 75 Hz officially. If you happen to know it, please let me know.
To use the touchpad the InputDevice section should look like the following if you're using gpm repeater:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse2"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "MouseSystems"
Option "Device" "/dev/gpmdata"
EndSection
However, I recommend using the Synaptics TouchPad driver you can find on this page. It supports almost all features of the TouchPad and works flawlessly under SuSE 8.0 on my laptop right now. The configuration and install instructions are included with the driver.
Here is the XF86Config file I have. It works flawlessly on my system. It is modified to work with the touchpad as the CorePointer and assumes you have gpm running with the repeater function. If you don't have a 14.1" display model be sure to remove 1024x768 from the list of valid modes in the Screen section of the config file.
Text mode looks pretty bad thanks to the new graphics system. The
older 20x series notebooks used to have ATI Rage Mobility chips but
have been eliminated in favor of the integrated CyberBlade core to get
the system price down I think. 210 series notebooks are selling
incredibly cheap nowerday.
Now there is exactly one way to get a decent text console. You can use
the VESA framebuffer. It is awful slow, it reminds you of that old 386
you had ages ago, but it looks really good on the other hand. You'll
get a text console in 1024x768, though it may be a bit slow.
You must enable this in the kernel config when you compile your
kernel or choose a kernel with VESA fb included from your
distribution. In the kernel config go to Console Drivers ->
Frame-buffer support and activate it. The thing we are looking for is
entitled "VESA VGA graphics console" and must be compiled
into the kernel.
You'll have to activate the console at boot time with a kernel
parameter. The kernel documentation Documentation/fb/vesafb.txt
explains how it works. To get your console at 1024x768x64k for
example, append "vga=791" as kernel parameter. In your
lilo.conf file for example.
That's it. You now should have a text console that you'll love because it looks sooo sexy and hate because it's so damn slow. :^)
There is also a quite young trident framebuffer driver project at sourceforge. I haven't tried out this myself yet.
Suspend via APM does not work. The systems suspends nicely, wakes
up again, restores the screen and then locks up. If anyone knows more
about this I'd be happy to hear from you.
More informtation on this can be found on these postings on the Linux
kernel mailinglist: [1]
[2].
XV was totally broken with this graphics chipset under XFree 4.1.0. This problems were all fixed in release 4.2.0. If you have problems with the XV extension, upgrade to 4.2.0. Now the DVD player Ogle for example runs perfectly. Unfortunately there seems to be no hardare accelerated iDCT transform yet, so the DVD plays not always 100% smooth.
Switching from X to the console (at least with vesafb console) takes some tries. If at first you don't succed... press the keys some times. It normally works with the 4th or 5th try.
There seems to a problem with "Local APIC" on this system. Make sure to compile your kernel without that option or append "disableapic" as a kernel paramater on boot. This seems to interfere with X making it to fail "in some weird way".
I installed SuSE 8.0 on my laptop. Everything went fine so far, except that there was one problem with the cardbus slot. The wrong driver is loaded for the cardbus adapter. The SuSE scripts probe the yenta_socket first and the thing loads and causes the slot to malfunction. If you have problems with your cardbus slot not working, see if yenta_socket is loaded when you type "lsmod". The quick and easy solution for this problem is just deleting the driver in "/lib/modules/2.4.18-4GB/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/yenta_socket.o". If you have removed the file restart the pcmcia services (with "/etc/init.d/pcmcia stop" and "start" again) or just reboot. Now the correct driver i82365.o is loaded and everything should work just fine. The better solution for this problem is to manually set which socket driver is loaded in the file "/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia". Set the option "PCMCIA_PCIC="i82365" ". Thanks to Joerg Steffens from SuSE for sending me this hint.
PCMCIA Fast Ethernet card Netgear FA411: This card does not work reliably in the notebook's CardBus slot. The performance of the card is extremly bad given it's a Fast Ethernet card. I managed to get 1.2 MB/s max. Additionally the card has a transmit problem. Once 10-50 kb are transfered, the card stops working completely. Only a reboot of the system brings the card back alive. Netgear support hasn't answered any of my questions about this problem so I suggest staying away from the FA411.
PCMCIA Longshine ShineNet (Fast Ethernet) LCS-8538TX: I have a report that this card works extremly slow in this notebook. Like 4 kb/s transfer rate. Given that this is a Fast Ethernet card it's one more example of total crap hardware. If you want a general advice about getting a decent Fast Ethernet card: Stay away from any PCMCIA card and only buy a CardBus card.
Here are some screenshots from X: KDE 2.2.2 running on Slackware 8.0 | KDE 3.0 running on SuSE 8.0.
| Model | Distribution(s) used | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 210 TEV | Debian (woody) | http://www.hwahl.de/Linux/linux.html |
It's your laptop and your responsibility what you do with it. So I cannot be responsible for anything that happenes. I didn't even write a single piece of software you're going to install on it. :^) If you are aware of any dangerous mistakes in this guide that may cause damage to the hardware, please inform me.
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