# Gateway EC1803 / Acer Aspire 1410

## figueroa

Upon selling my Acer made eMachine emd620, I started the search for a netbook, but wanting something better than 1024 x 600 video.  I found what looked like a dream machine at the right price at Tiger Direct, the Gateway EC1803, that is essentially a slightly cosmetically altered Aspire 1410.

I spent the best part of a day trying to get Linux Mint installed in a 50 G partition but was being thwarted by disk errors upon rebooting.  Not to be daunted, I cloned the Gentoo installation from my Sony laptop (similar hardware) made the necessary kernel tweaks, and continued to experience hard drive errors on rebooting to the extent that sometimes I could get to a prompt, and sometimes I could not.

I searched the web for knowledge and found that installing the BIOS upgrade from the Acer web site http://www.acer.ca/acer/service.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&miu10einu24.current.attN2B2F2EEF=3751&sp=page15e&ctx2.c2att1=27&miu10ekcond13.attN2B2F2EEF=3751&CountryISOCtxParam=CA&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=719687231 for the Aspire 1410 was being done with success and according the the posters badly needed.  (Acer classifies the 1410 as a small notebook, not a netbook.)

So, from Vista (ugh) I installed the BIOS from the Acer Aspire 1410 (the computer isn't even listed on Gateway's web site), the current version being 1.3310, identified as simply 3310 on Acer's site, which went perfectly.

And now: EVERYTHING works perfectly without error.  Although I'm using Gentoo, I can also report that Linux Mint version 8 also appears to work perfectly out of the box supporting all of the hardware the best I can tell.  (This helped me identify the right kernel modules to add to my Gentoo kernel.)

----------

