GNU/Linux on an Acer Travelmate 250

This is a short article on the features and problems that come with running a GNU/Linux on an Acer Travelmate 250.

ive got this laptop a while ago, almost two years ago , and have been using debian on it for about the same amount of time, with some adventures to fc and freebsd.

not all of the features on it work yet with gnu, but it is definitely usable.

so, lets start off

the distribution:

i run debian on it, simply cause i am used to debian, and im running it on most of my other machines, it has, as far as it comes for me, the most flexibility for customisation.

im running a debian sarge on it.

about the hardware:

the travelmate 250 has the following specs:

the cpu: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz
yes, right, that is a desktop p4, the performance is quite well, but it just eats up way too much from the batteries, acer, what where you thinking?

ram: normally its 248Megabytes, but i upgraded it to 512Megabytes, who runs a computer with 248Megabytes these day anyways...

cdr/dvd: Slimtype COMBO LSC-24082K, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

floppy: the tm250 normally comes with a built in floppy drive 3.5, except they have removed that from mine, for what reason ever...

gfx: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device, not the best of the best, has only very little gfx ram, but does the job quite well under gnu.

touchpad: the touchpad is a synaptics touchpad, it is supported by debian, but the linux driver has quite some bugs, ill get on that later.

display: the display is done quite well, its a 16" lcd display, which is a bit larger than the actual gfx card may handle, which is very sad, i was only able to get it up to 1024x768, not really what id call a top resolution for a display of that size. once again, acer, what where you thinking?

other compontens included in the laptop are:
four usb controllers, intel type
one ultra ata ide controller, intel type
one intel onboard audio controller, ich4, ac97
one ac97 onboard modem
two cardbus controllers
one onboard rtl8138 compatible ethernet interface

components i added:
one pcmcia rtl8139 compatible card
one usb stick belkin with 250Megabytes of storage space
one pcmcia wlan card, netgear ma401

components i havent yet tried:
ive just got me a usb bluetooth dongle from belkin, have to try that one out under debian yet.

the installation:

i had no problems installing debian sarge on it at all, you just put in the cd, it starts the setup, i did with "linux26" option, to get me a 2.6 linux kernel to start with.

after the install finished, i just added my favorite gui to it:

aptitude -f install gnome2
aptitude -f install xfree86-common gdm

now i needed to add the following packet, to get the synaptics working right under x:

aptitude -f install xfree86-driver-synaptics

then changed the following entries in my XF86Config-4 file:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

after the next restart of the gui i had full support of the synaptics features.

after that i tried to install different technics to lower the battery usage of my system, including speedstepping of the cpu via cpufreqd.

sadly that didnt work out right, as soon as i started the cpufreqd daemon, i got into troubles with the touchpad, it started to jump, and open different programs on my desktop randomly, so i had to disable the speedstepping in favor of keeping my gui usable. from what i have heard, im not the only one running into that problem, different sources say, that this has been fixed with 2.6.10 and above kernel versions, but i have tried 2.6.13.1, and i can say i still get that error.

the next thing i tried to get running with my acer was a sad experience as well, maybe it is just me, or the specialkeys work with no existing specialkey module out there.

so after that two problematic steps, i tried my luck on the wlan card, after installing the hostap modules, which are preferred for prism2 card, which my netgear is, it worked without any further troubles, debian sarge has prebuild hostap modules for their kernels on their main mirrors, so all i did was:

aptitude -f install hostap-modules-2.6.8-2-386

and put in the card.

since i dont own a wireless ap, i was unable to test things like wpasupplicant with it, but there should be no problem from what i have heard from other users of this branch of laptops.

the pcmcia rtl8139 card, i got me this one, after the onboard rtl8139 connector started to make problems, it seems to get abused pretty fast, so that the cable didnt connected that well after two years of disconnecting and reconnecting.

the pcmcia rtl8139 card worked with no problems out of the box.

the belkin usb stick had no troubles as well, i jus t connected it, and it was working, automatically mounted, and a window showing its content popped up on my gnome desktop, it is using usb2 as protocol, so there are no speed troubles as well.

on the application side, the problems as of right now with synaptics touchpads and firefox as well as with mozilla are, that the browsers jump back and forth if youre moving the touchpad and holding/unholding it very fast, so i gave another browser a try, a rather new co brand of gtk and mozilla called epiphany, which will become eventually the future web browser of the gnome project, with that browser i had no troubles with the touchpad anymore.

nother very sad thing with the latest branchs of acer laptops is, that theyre using a phoenix technologies bios, and those bioses are lagging options, for one id be very happy, if i could regulate cpu speed via bios rather than going over daemons, that have problems with other hardware components.

for the harddisk theyve built in, its a pretty fast one, but under gnu i had problems with enabling dma on it via hdparm, the problems showed off in disk syncs in the middle of file transfers from and to the lan and other partitions on the system.

i did not play with the modem, for one simple reason, i have no dialup internet, and no phone line, so that wouldnt make much sense for me, but im thankful if you might try it out and email me back with informations about it.

also, after two years of using it, i think i should open it up, and clean the interior a bit, cause currently it is heating up way too fast, i cannot compile a single sourcecode on it, cause it shuts down in the middle of it, the garantuee is off, so there is no risk of loosing it.

to round things up, the acer travelmate 250 is an ok laptop, it has its usability with gnu, and dont get mad at gnu cause of the problems with certain components, the most problems with these components are there, because acer doesnt give out hardware information about these components to the gnu developers, maybe thats where things need to change in the future, cause i think the most important thing for manufacturers should be, that the customers are happy with their products.

i hope you enjoy your beautiful laptop, and get somewhat more happy with my lil howto on it.

Greetings Oliver