Linux on the Acer 5100-5033

I recently purchased this machine. It comes with Vista Home edition and 1G RAM. I upgraded it to 2G, since I figured it would work much better.

Overview

The machine is very nice. Relatively light in weight, has a very bright and crisp screen. Vista booted fine; I created the "backup DVDs" as per Acer's recommendations. This machine has an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 1.6G CPU, built-in wifi, 120G HD, DVD R/W, and now 2G RAM.

I've had several other Acer machines in the past, and this one is very similar except the batter is quite different (so incompatible) and the keyboard layout is a little different. Fortunately, Acer replaced the push-buttons on the front of the case with slide-switches, so one cannot accidentally turn the wifi off. Of course, I also know that Acer machines often use weird or non-supported well hardware, so I was prepared for a bit of a struggle.

I had hoped to get Linux installed right away, but my usual distro did not install properly, nor did my Slax disk. After a bit of research, I found that both Kubuntu and Mandriva will work ok on this machine, but for some inexplicable reason neither includes the madwifi drivers, and they make it difficult to get them installed. Kubuntu also has an excessively "dumbed down" interface, which makes it difficult to "get things done". So I went back to the research department ...

First attempts

First I tried a brand-new, Slax 6RC3 boot disk, since I had seen how well it worked on my current Acer laptop. However, the boot hangs. Pressing the ENTER key allows the boot to continue, but it never seems to work correctly.

Next, I tried my normal Frugalware install - I tried an 0.4 install as well as a shiny-new FWLive - both failed in a similar manner to the Slax boot. It seems that detection of hardware is not good.

I then tried Kubuntu, and was pleasantly surprised to see it installed just fine (with the annoyance that the Wifi was not supported). This install went very smoothly and the system functioned well enough, but I find the Ubuntu model annoying.

I made one more try, this time with Mandriva - it also installed and booted well, and also did not install MadWifi; so it didn't work with my wifi. What's the deal with that, I wonder?

Debugging the boot failures

To get to the bottom of the boot failures, I tried the following:

• nohotplug kernel option - didn't help
• msi=off kernel option - didn't help

After poking around online, I found a comment to the effect that plugging in an external USB mouse would help. So I tried that, and indeed it did help! "Regular" distributions load if the USB mouse is plugged in. More investigation revealed that adding idle=poll to the kernel boot line allows the kernel to boot without requiring the mouse be plugged in. (I still am investigating why this is an issue Ron 11:27, 8 June 2007 (EDT))

Getting set-up

So after I found I could boot my favorite distros, I decided to reformat the disk and give Vista only 20G instead of 50G. So my disk map now looks like:

• sda1 - 9G (hidden Vista partition for recovery)
• sda2 - 20G Vista, bootable
• sda3 - 80G Linux
• sda4 - 1G Linux swap

I did the Acer recovery thing, then I booted my Frugalware DVD and tried to install it (remembering to use the idle=poll kernel option). I was able to successfully install, and boot into Frugalware on the machine! However, the wifi device is not correctly working - apparently it's too new and I need the very latest madwifi.

Rebooted the machine and decided to boot into Vista and get it back up to speed, only to find the Acer "eRecovery" thing taking hold again :( So I'm currently re-recovering Vista, hopefully it will be done soon...

To try:

• add pci=nommconf
• if madwifi still won't work, upgrade manually from the madwifi site.