Linux installation on an Acer Travelmate 230XC
A friend of mine got herself an Acer Travelmate 230XC and I helped her with the installation of linux on this machine.
If you have any questions, please send me an email to . Also
if you miss some specific information about the notebook, or maybe would like to see the output of some commands: Send me an email. Be specfic.
You can find the output of "lspci -vv" here.
Kernel version: 2.4.19.
Graphics adapter: Installation was problematic, i.e. it crashed in Sax2. Afer installing xfree86 4.3 which contains support for
the graphics chipset contained in this notebook, we noticed that we would have only had to enable more shared memory for the vga chip in the computer's BIOS for it to work
(on startup, press f2. Go to "Advanced", change "IGD - memory type" to "UMA = 8MB").
Sound: Don't remember...
CDRW/DVD: Reading cds worked. Haven't tried writing yet.
Touchpad: Worked out of the box, except for the scroll-key.
Network adapter: Worked.
ACPI: Had to be disabled because computer would crash on shutdown. This can probably be dealt with by using the "modules_not_to_unload" configuration of ACPI, leaving
problematic modules loaded.
PCMCIA: Had to be disabled. Set "nopcmcia=yes" as a boot option for the kernel.
Other stuff: The "<>|" key does not work. It worked after the xfree-update and changing the keyboard section in XF86Config to contain the line
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
(and not 104) though.
Other components (usb, modem, etc.) were not tested yet.
Kernel version: 2.4.20.
Graphics adapter: Works probably due to xfree 4.3 which is included. Also check the bios memory settings mentioned in the section on SuSE 8.1 above. Take a look at the
XF86Config of this machine. It is not at all optimized, but it works.
Sound: Works.
CDRW/DVD: Reading and writing work.
Touchpad: Worked out of the box, except for the scroll-key. It gets very configurable using the
Synaptics touchpad driver for linux which already comes with SuSE.
USB: Works.
Network adapter: Works.
ACPI: Seems to work partially; weird numbers are reported for battery status. When it is full, it shows 123% or so.
Other components (modem, etc.) were not tested yet.
Some links