Installing Linux on an Acer 200T

The Specs

Acer 200T (Travelmate)
Intel Celeron 500MHz Processor
64MB DRAM
5.4G Hard Disk
12" TFT Screen
24X CD-ROM
ATI Rage Mobility-M video card with 4M VRAM
Lucent Technologies Soft Modem
"SoundBlaster-Pro compatible" sound card (Yeah, right).
Uses the Cirrus Logic CS4299 chipset

Compatibility

In short, everything works except for the modem and the sound card. See details below.

Repartitioning the Disk

The hard disk came with Windows 98SE pre-installed and hogging up the entire disk. The laptop doesn't come with a full-fledged Win98 CD: it comes with a "Recovery CD". Essentially, if something really goes wrong, you can use the Recovery CD to restore the laptop to its manufacturer's setup. That means it will repartition and reformat your hard disk, wiping out Linux. The only option, therefore is to use FIPS.EXE to shrink the Windows partition. FIPS comes with most Linux distributions.

• First, degrag your disk (Start->Programs->System Tools->disk defrag).
• The FIPS documentation comes with instructions on how to shrink the partition, so follow them. Except for turning off the Virtual Memory! We tried doing that and Windows couldn't even draw the Start menu. Stupid OS, can't even run with 64M Ram!
• After we shrunk the partition, we tried to reboot to Windows. It hung after setting up the desktop. Now, whether that was because of a currupt swap file, or just because it's one of windows' random hangs, I don't know. We powered down and then back up. Windows did a disk-check and then everything was fine. No worries.

Installing Redhat 6.2

In general, it was painless (especially when compared with 7.0). Here are a few pointers.

• You can boot straight off the CD-ROM. Choose the textmode option. The default uses X-windows and will freeze up the system.
• When it comes time to setup X-windows, it will probe the PCI card and should come up with the correct card settings. Choose an "LCD 800x600 panel" from the list of monitors.
• DO NOT TEST THE SETUP. It will freeze up the system if you do.
• Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and change the line that defines the Horizontal sync rates. It will be fixed-sync and so none of the pre-defined Modelines will work. Change the line to:

            Horiz     60-65
            

  Here is my XF86Config file.

Using the Touchpad

Even though the Touchpad is a PS/2 device, it won't work with either the gpm or XFree86 PS/2 driver. Instead, you need to run gpm with the following switches:

     /usr/sbin/gpm -t synps2 -R
     

The -R switch makes gpm act as a repeater. Essentially, since XFree86 doesn't have a synps2 driver, gpm will translate the synps2 events into msc (by default) events and dump them to the fifo /dev/gpmdata. Then, you can have XFree86 get the mouse events from /dev/gpmdata instead of /dev/mouse. Now, if you plug a bona-fide PS/2 mouse into the PS/2 port, then this will disable the touchpad. This seems to be at the hardware level, so you have to choose. In any case, with a real PS/2 mouse, you setup gpm and XFree86 as usual. One thing I have managed to do is have a serial mouse and the touchpad work at the same time. In this case, you run gpm with the following switches:

     /usr/sbin/gpm -t synps2 -M -t mman -m /dev/ttyS0
     

Here, gpm is getting data from multiple ports. It still decodes the data and dumps it to /dev/gpmdata, so XFree86 can read events from both mouse and touchpad.

What's not working

There are a couple of problems with linux and Acer200T:

• The modem is a soft-modem or, more commonly, called a win-modem. This means you can't talk to it using minicom or cu or chat to get a PPP connection going.

  There is some work going on to get winmodems to work under linux and Lucent winmodems are supposed to be supported at this time. See:

  • http://linmodems.org
  • http://mobilix.org/modem_linux.html
  • linmodem HOWTO

  I've tried all these solutions and at best I get a "Device or Resourse busy" message when I try to load the module. There may be a kernel problem (I'm currently useing 2.2.16) or it may be a hardware problem. I'm still working on it. But I have an external modem and it works fine. Bloody annoying though, when you have a builtin.

• The sound card is not supported by Redhat Linux 6.2 (at least, that's what sndconfig says). I downloaded the OSS demo drivers to see if they would wake up the soundcard, but not such luck. I wrote to OSS and they said the sound card is currently not supported by their drivers, but may be supported "sometime next year". Oh well.