# Gentoo On Acer Experiences?

## theMerge

I recently got an Acer 5100 laptop with the AMD chipset.  It's a fairly good "budget" machine from what I can tell.

I'm wondering if anyone has Acer AMD experiences using Gentoo.  How's it run, how's the hardware support, how easy is it to get the broadcom wireless card working?

Comments?

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## bunder

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Kernel & Hardware.

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## paulbiz

I have an Acer Ferrari 3400 running Gentoo 64-bit and it is a beast, runs great. Everything on it works, even the winmodem and IR port! I had to use ndiswrapper with windows 64 drivers for the wifi. The last time I tried the native drivers, they were still very green and caused the system to die every time it initialized... I have not tried it since.

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## Pithlit

I _know_ my next lappy's gonna be an Acer too... I hope this answers the questions.

(ACPI needed some hacking but no biggie... follow the yello... guide and all's fine)

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## swimmer

I run a Travelmate 4001 LMWI and a Travelmate 6292 and everything works! For some things you have to tweak a bit (framebuffer + onboard sound on 6292) but it's all doable even for me  :Wink: 

@Pithlit: What kind of ACPI hacks did you use  and what's the yello... guide?!??!

Greetz

swimmer

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## Pithlit

Swimmer: on my lappy the battery refused to work with the battery monitors - buggy DSDT. So some tweaking needed to be done. Follow the yellow brick road to fix  buggy DSDT.

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## ToeiRei

Just look at the wiki... the acer tm800 was one of the best documented laptops there. I am still using it and my next one will definitively be an acer too;

Rei

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## kevman

I have an Acer 5672wlmi , like a metric TON of people here do.

Everything is Linux supported. Except maybe the webcam, maybe.

Wireless, the Mobility Radeon (which runs compiz like it was made for it, oddly), the multimedia buttons. All of it. And it won't void your warranty.

I switched from Gentoo to Kubuntu because it was a pain in the butt to maintain (lots of stuff to keep working. Kernel config wasn't fun), and everything is Kubuntu supported too.

Build quality could be better, but its more than adequate. I love this thing. Four hour battery life out of something that will run Oblivion well!? I'll take it.

Run the Omega video drivers in Windows, though. The ATI drivers don't like this thing.

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## roderick

I have two... The 1410 and 9410 from the Aspire series. Both are Intel chipset based (including Graphics card).

I love my Acer laptop, right from the Keyboard out. I always find their displays to be top notch and clear/bright as compared to others. I also like the fact that they use a predominant Intel chipset, which makes for great Linux compatibility (seeing as the Intel drivers are more mature all around).

My next laptop will also be an Acer, and I'm getting one with one of the new Intel cards GM965 (http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/GM965/index.htm) which should put Intel back in the gaming ring (hopefully). 

Anyway, I know, ATI and nVidia are top dogs, but there's room for Intel too.  :Smile: 

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## tylerwylie

 *roderick wrote:*   

> I have two... The 1410 and 9410 from the Aspire series. Both are Intel chipset based (including Graphics card).
> 
> I love my Acer laptop, right from the Keyboard out. I always find their displays to be top notch and clear/bright as compared to others. I also like the fact that they use a predominant Intel chipset, which makes for great Linux compatibility (seeing as the Intel drivers are more mature all around).
> 
> My next laptop will also be an Acer, and I'm getting one with one of the new Intel cards GM965 (http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/GM965/index.htm) which should put Intel back in the gaming ring (hopefully). 
> ...

 I'm getting a Thinkpad T61 with the GMAX3100(GM965 chipset) for graphics, I'll let you know how that works in linux  :Smile: 

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## theMerge

Thanks for the relpys.  I'm now running fluxbox and compiling gnome!

It seems responsive, certainly more so than Ubuntu, but that's not saying much.  While Ubuntu is feature complete, it's no speed demon.

The only problem I've had was that my bcm43xx driver was a PAIN IN THE BUTT to get working right.  It is a pain to get the firmware and it doesn't load all the kernel modules it needs (ieee80211_crypt_wep).  But now it's doing fine (with a little googling and a lot of hair pulling).

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## IvanMajhen

I have travelmate 2490, celeron m430 (1,73 GHz, sse3), gma945. 

Everything works. Never had problems with suspend/suspend2/tuxonice. 

Even software LCD brightness works with kpowersave, all keys are working, mail led works - it doesnt on XP.

I had to patch kmail to turn on mail led. (kmfoldertree.cpp)

Only minor problems with bcm43xx/b43 driver (tx power), but it works like in windows with ndiswrapper.

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## theMerge

Great to hear from all of you.

I'm also having a good experience.  So far I've got everything working as far as hardware is concerned.  The only problems I've had were because of stupid kernel config issues.  For instance: if you want the kernel to AUTOMATICALLY load modules, you need to enable AUTOMATICALLY LOAD MODULES.  Der-d-dert-dert-dert!

Anyone using the camera?

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## Pithlit

LOL... yea, kernel is dodgy like that   :Laughing: 

No camera here, sorry.

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## fumoffu

I've got an TravelMate 3012WTMi. A Subnotebook with a 12,1 inch Screen. It works great with Gentoo; WLan, Bluetooth, Suspend2Disk and what not. Even the builtin camera works using gspcav1. I only haven't gotten Suspen2Ram working yet.

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## Mamizou

I have an Aspire 5000...  and it's okay.  Mine has the wretched SiS760, whose drivers are pretty decent, outside of the fact that it has absolutely _no_ hardware graphics acceleration (the SiS760 being a malformed piece...).  The only problems I've seen are... the expected issues with the bcm43xx drivers, the CPU not being as fast as I hoped (Turion64 ML-32, w\ 512KB cache...  definitely helps to have more), and of course no DRI support.  The suspend stuff seems a little dodgy, and I haven't really tried it yet except for suspend-to-ram, which seems to wake up to nothing.  Also, having a SATA drive seems to speed things up a bit.  The wireless card seems to have issues, but it does work sometimes (using in-kernel drivers).  Haven't tried Bluetooth yet.

As long as it has DRI supported, and at least 1MB of CPU cache, it should be a quick little machine.

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## dr_cerebro

Well, I'm not that happy as most of you with Acer.  I bought this Acer Aspire 5050-4872 brand new two months ago, specially for learning Linux, and I solved some of the problems, but there is a lot of problems I still can not solve.  

Wireless just detected if installed acer_acpi.  Madwifi does not support my card, I had to use Ndiswrapper (and still have no clue how did I make it work, was a mix of howtos from Ubuntu and Gentoo)

Battery not detected, it has to be a buggy DSDT, I'm still afraid to mess with that.

Orbicam not detected

Bluetooth not working.

Currenty working under Sabayon Professional Edition 1.1, I moved from Ubuntu few days ago (was easier to get wireless working under Ubuntu, at least the steps are reproducible in order to work, in Sabayon, I'm not sure what I did, but I make wireless work twice, with different steps).

Sadly for me, I used the LiveCD in my laptop Dell Precision M65 and in my wife's laptop Sony Vaio PCG-K33F and it worked perfectly "Out of the box".

I don't know if one of these days will be a Linux distro which works in Acer Laptops "Out of the box"

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