Caution: This page is old and unmaintained. It is here for reference only. Do not ask me questions about this system--I no longer use it. The information here is based on using an old hand-upgraded Slackware distribution.

Linux vs. AcerNote Light

I have an AcerNote Light Multimedia model 372, and have installed Linux on it. Here's what I've learned in the process. See the Linux Laptop page for more laptop help.

Kernel

APM

I found that the APM of my AcerNote was non-standard, so don't use a kernel with APM support compiled in. The BIOS will happily spin down an idle hard drive without kernel support, but it doesn't seem to go into suspend mode.

It seems that someone has figured out, at least for some AcerNote models, how to patch the kernel to deal with their APM oddities. I haven't played with these patches myself, but you can find them at either Kurt Huwig's page or Linux Mama.

PCMCIA

This seems to be totally standard. I've only tried it with my 28.8 modem card, but it seems to work as expected. See the PCMCIA HOWTO for more info.

For reference, the Windows 95 Device Manager tells me that it sees a "Cirrus Logic PCIC compatible PCMCIA controller." If you happen to know of a good way to find out more detailed information, let me know, and I'll post it here.

I've heard reports from others with slightly different AcerNote models that they have TI chipsets, not Cirrus. They've also reported having trouble with getting it to work. Good luck.

Mouse

The trackpad is a PS/2 mouse, so you have to compile in kernel support for that type of mouse. Having done so, it works great. I also use an external PS/2 mouse, and Linux seems to think they're the same mouse. If you use an external serial mouse, there's a hack with gpm where it reads both mice, and outputs to a pseudo device which X uses for its input.

Sound

The sound card seems to be an ES1688 PnP AudioDrive. Note that playing audio CDs does not require the use of a sound driver, so that's a separate (and easier) issue.

I've heard a report that it works fine with the commercial sound driver OSS/Linux, and will work fine with the free version if you use "esscfg.exe" under dosemu to set the IO port and IRQ.

Fortunately, there is a kernel patch available that will make sound work. Like almost all Linux patches, you can find it at Linux v2 HQ. Unless they change the link, you can go directly to the patch for 2.0.x kernels.

Once you get the sound card initialized, you'll need a kernel with sound support for:

The following parameters worked:

PCI

I get 3 boot warnings about unknown PCI devices. I used to get 4, but upgrading to 2.0.29 removed one, as the video chipset is now detected.

PLIP

Since it came with a Laplink cable, I set it up to run PLIP (that's like SLIP, only through the parallel port). It took a bit of struggling through the HOWTO and playing with the BIOS settings for the port, but it works just fine now. If you haven't used PLIP, be prepared for it to be much faster than SLIP, but be warned that it really chews on the CPU. I also get a lot of timeout error messages in my kernel log, but TCP takes care of retransmitting when there's an error, so that's no big deal.

It is really cool to see my laptop surfing the web and telnetting into other machines over the net when hooked up to my desktop with PLIP while my desktop system is running IP Masquarade over my PPP link (hopefully soon to be upgraded to a cable modem).

X

Here's my XF86Config

I recompiled XFree86 3.2 to only include support for the CT65550 chipset with a Pentium-optimizing version of gcc. It's certainly a smaller binary than the standard distribution binary, and since I only have 16 Megs, that was the point. If you would like a copy, here's my /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA. Of course, it needs to be suid-root.

Sometimes I have trouble with the X server crashing or leaving the text display in the wrong mode. This may be fixed with XFree86 3.2A, though I haven't tried it. The announcement claimed:

Hardware

Be warned that the AcerNote Light 372 has no L2 cache. While this will save power and cost, it will also slow the system down. (No, the use of EDO DRAM does not eliminate the need for a good L2 cache.)

Note that it runs at a different speed depending on whether the screen is up. If you boot it with the screen down, it gets 25.50 BogoMIPS, but with the screen up, it gets 47.92 BogoMIPS. I'm concerned that since the kernel uses BogoMIPS to time device drivers that it might have problems with the change in speed, though I haven't experienced any such problems.