Works
No special procedure required during installation
Intel 915GM Integrated Graphics Adapter, using main memory
Works
No special procedure required during installation
512MB, SDRAM
Works
No special procedure required during installation
60 GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
Works
No special procedure required during installation
Integrated Network Card, RealTek RTL-8139
Not tested
But should work without problem: is recognize by the kernel
Internal 56k Modem, Intel ICH6 family
Not Tested
No information
DVD+/-R/RW reader/burner
Works but...
... see below for issues
Atheros Wireless Networking
Works
Requires a recompiled kernel and specific packages.
Battery
Works but...
... battery level not recognized by the system by default (see below for workaround)
Intel ICH6 Sound Card
Works
No problem with the ALSA drivers included in the kernel
This laptop is currently operating under Kernel version 2.6.16, but I installed it with 2.6.12 and also used 2.6.15 for a long time and it worked the same.
I'm an expat in Vietnam and I was looking for a cheap laptop but not the absolute low-end. My budget was around US$1000-1200. Here in Vietnam, the number of available laptops is limited and the prices are quite high compared to other countries in South-East Asia. If I had to do it again, I would have probably taken a flight to Singapore and bought it there: more choices and the price of the plane ticket with a low cost company is still cheaper than the price difference between the laptops.
My requirements were:
At least 512MB of RAM
NO Windows OS
At least 60GB of HDD
A DVD burner
Basic Installation of Debian Testing (Etch):
I'm a Debian fan, so I really wanted to have Debian installed on this laptop. However, in the past, I also enjoyed playing with Gentoo, so I wanted to have a double-boot system with both the latest Debian testing and the latest Gentoo.
I planned a network installation and I wanted to install from WiFi. But the default Debian installation disk #1 does not include any Atheros WiFi controller drivers. And installing them after the basic installation required a lot of downloading of dependencies if I wanted to do it properly, the “Debian way”. So the easiest way if you want a network install is to do it from the Ethernet controller, which should work without problem. However, that's not what I did. I used a chrooted Gentoo environment to install Debian. Why? Because compiling and configuring the MadWifi drivers (name of the drivers for the Atheros chipsets) was much easier on Gentoo than it is on Debian. So I could do the whole installation based only on a LiveCD from Gentoo, a few gentoo ebuilds and the tar.gz of the MadWifi drivers, and the first disk of Debian without ever using the Ethernet cable. But that's because I forgot to bring an RJ45 cable. Plugging my laptop on the RJ45 plug of my WiFi Access Point would have been much easier!
The standard installation of Debian worked flawlessly on this laptop (as well as the Gentoo one). Some people on the net advise to disable ACPI for Acer laptops installations so I did it (who needs ACPI at install time anyway?), but I don't know if it was really necessary.
Setting up additional features for Debian Etch:
I recompiled my kernel to use only the requested features.
Starting with 2.6.16, I configured
Suspend-to-RAM and Suspend-To-Disk. I guess it would
work too with my former 2.6.15, but these 2 functionalities have had
so many nightmare stories that I don't want to bet on it! You can
try it out. Given all those stories, I was expecting something much
worse, but so far it has gone smoothly. I recompiled my kernel
activating the following
options:
CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND=y
CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS=y
I've
also installed GNOME Power Manager:
#
aptitude install gnome-power-manager
And
now it works smoothly! Nothing else to do. When I click on the tray
icon for Power Manager, I am given the option to suspend
or hibernate. Both are working.
And I have configured Power Manager to suspend, hibernate or
shutdown under different battery conditions in the Preferences.
Though this laptop is working OK, there are a few unresolved issues, and some of them makes me regret I bought it:
Due to some specific battery
technology used in Acer laptops (I'm not sure about the reason), by
default, I could not have battery status on this machine. I
was just guessing when it would die (in normal usage, the battery
life is 2.5 to 3 hours). Thanks to very good advice from Lars
Hansen, I tried the ec_burst=1
parameter at boot (added in /boot/grub/menu.lst),
my battery status is finally correct. The modification is as below:
#
kopt=root=/dev/hda7 ec_burst=1 ro
This ACPI thing was causing a constant flow of ACPI error messages on the console, so the consoles were basically unusable... Again, the ec_burst=1 trick solved the problem. Thanks again to Lars Hansen for this good piece of advice.
This is not a Linux specific issue, but the DVD drive of this computer is really bad. It's a PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-K16RA. The first thing is that Acer really played it cheap when they designed the laptop and they used only ONE IDE controller !!! So the hard disk and the DVD are sharing the same IDE bus. Combine this with the fact that this DVD drive is really unreliable (it cannot read 75% of the DVDs I use!) and you end up with a really disastrous DVD experience. Every time there is the slightest gotcha on a DVD, the whole bus locks up and the system with it. Recovering usually takes a long time as you have to wait for never-ending IDE timeouts and the hard-disk is unresponsive too! Very frustrating when you are in the middle of a movie.
This is not a Linux related issue either, but the keyboard sucks. Sometimes, it's skipping some keystrokes (this is a known issue with interrupt handling apparently) and the feel is not so good. I've never been a great fan of laptop keyboards, but this one is below average.
To conclude, I'm a fan of standard installations. I didn't have any specific problems installing Linux on this laptop. The one thing that makes me regret my investment are these DVD problems. I'm currently considering bringing it back for warranty because it's not normal that even simple CD-ROMs are causing problems. When I went to buy the laptop, originally I wanted a Joybook from BenQ but they were not available anymore, so I opted for the Acer, which seemed nice. I regret it now, but the Acer is not so bad.
I know this review is rather short and lacks technical details, but I'm a lazy guy :-) I'm sorry about that. If you have any specific inquiries, you can write to me at: gralex AT free DOT fr.