Acer TravelMate 4001WLMi

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    - Fedora Core 2
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To make a long story short, the notebook runs basically fine with Fedora Core 2 out of the box, although not all details function as they should. More on that later.

After unpacking the notebook I put in the Fedora Core CD #1, connected the ethernet cable to my LAN, and turned it on. When the welcome screen appeared, I hit F2 to get into the BIOS Setup menu. A little nosing around never harms. I changed the boot order setting to try booting the CD first.

When the Fedora boot screen came on, I selected "linux askmethod". This allowed me to choose my local LAN server to proceed the installation from. By pointing the installer to the location where I kept the Fedora Core ISO images, the installer will use these and I don't need to keep feeding it with CD's.

Before the installation process asked me about partitioning, I switched to an alternate console and used fdisk to inspect the disk layout. From external sources I'd heard that it was possible to perform a complete recovery of the OEM supplied system on the first partition, so I reserved a generous 10Gb for that purpose.

The rest of the partioning is fairly standard: a 300Mb boot partition, a big extended partition for the root and home (and more), and a final swap partition.

Part Start End Size Type Use

hda1 1 1216 9767488+ c W95 FAT32

hda2 1217 1254 305235 83 Linux /boot

hda3 1255 7169 47512237+ 5 Extended

hda4 7170 7296 1020127+ 82 Linux swap Swap

hda5 1255 2471 9775521 83 Linux /

hda6 2472 3201 5863693+ 83 Linux /home

After creating the partitions, I switched back to the installer and proceeded with the installation. This went flawlessly. All devices were correctly identified. I installed all accumulated Fedora Core 2 updates, bringing the kernel to version 2.6.9. Technically speaking, the system was ready to rock.

A little investigation learned that the following components were not functioning optionally, if at all:

Reading battery and AC adapter status (no info);
Controlling the fans (doesn't work);
Controlling the CPU speed (no info, doesn't work);
Accelerated graphics (not available);
Wireless (requires special drivers);
Many of the "special keys";
Suspend to Disk;
Suspend to RAM;
...

The rest of this section describes the tricks and hacks needed to get most of these functional again.

Section "Acer keys" attacks the special Acer keys.

Section "ACPI hacking" attacks the harder issues of DSDT errors, CPU frequency scaling, and the battery status read out.