Acer TravelMate 4001WLMi

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I'm not going in too much details, but I decided to upgrade to (not install from scratch) Fedora Core 6. However, some time ago I found it necessary to resize some of the partitions and it was a hard and tedious job, so I decided to change the disk partitioning to logical volumes. It was a fun exercise, and worked out perfectly.

Basically, I scratched the 30Gb spare partition I had on the disk, and turned it into a physical volume (see the documentation of the Logical (Linux?) Volume Manager for details). I assigned it a volume group, and created a logical volume on wich I copied the existing Fedora Core 5 root. Then I booted the Fedora Core 6 DVD -- which refused to boot. Probably a rotten DVD? Fortunately I recently found out that I could boot the notebook from a USB stick, so I created a boot stick and booted from it. With “linux askmethod”, of course. I pointed the installer to the new, logical volume root, and proceeded the upgrade. Then I installed all accumulated Fedora Core 6 updates, bringing the kernel to version 2.6.20.

Later I did some more reshuffeling with the data on the partitions, and added the hard partitions to the volume group making one big volume. There I created several new logical volumes to end up with the final configuration:

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 2726 11823808+ 8e LVM2 VolGroup00

hda6 2772 3583 6883821 83 LVM2 VolGroup00

hda7 3584 7169 28804513+ 83 LVM2 VolGroup00

Logical volumes:

Volume Size Use

VolGroup00-FC6Root 12G /

VolGroup00-Home 7G /home

VolGroup00-Opt 1G /opt

VolGroup00-Local 4G /usr/local

VolGroup00-OldFC5Root 6G /mnt/fc5 (for reference)

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

Controlling the fans (doesn't work);
Many of the "special keys";
Suspend to RAM;

Major differences with the status after installing Fedora Core 5:

Reading battery and AC adapter status works;
Controlling the CPU speed works;
Wireless drivers are part of the kernel. The firmware needs to be fetched externally due to licensing issues;
Suspend to Disk works. I also experimented with Software Suspend 2, which also works.

Kernel patches required: DSDT from initrd.
Optional kernel patches: Software Suspend 2.

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, and better battery status read out.