Acer Aspire 1500 series: Linux installation.


The Acer Aspire 1500 series is one of the few Athlon 64 based laptops on the market at the time of writing (June 2004) and consists of three models. The 1501LCe is the low cost version with a low resolution screen (1024x768) and lacking a floppy disk drive and wireless ethernet. The 1501LMi has a 1400x1050 resolution screen, floppy and wireless ethernet. The 1502LMi is identical to the 1501LMi except for the processor, which is a 3200+ rather than a 3000+.

A complete specification is shown below:-

Colour coding: Green, working under Linux, Amber, partially or mostly working, Red, not working.

If you're interested, you can see the output from lspci and dmesg.

Basic install.

I merely used Mandrake 10.0 Official as downloaded as ISO images and used a normal install. Note that this is a 32bit install and not 64bit. There's no real need for the full 64 bit stuff yet IMHO at the moment. The install will go as normal, just make sure that you select to enable ACPI in the lilo or Grub set-up menus.

You should now have a working system, all be it not very well configured.

Required modifications.

Although you have a working machine using the standard installed kernel and utilities it's by no means a fully usable system. For a start the WiFi system doesn't work, the mouse pointer's jittery and the X display doesn't have acceleration. I will go through each of the sub-systems in turn taking you through the steps necessary.

Power Management

The stock Mandrake 10.0 kernel has ACPI built in but it doesn't have support for the Opteron/Athlon64 PowerNow sub-system. Hence, not only will your battery run down very quickly but if you have the machine on your lap you will get a very warm leg and the fan noise will become annoying. You will need to build a new kernel.

I downloaded the latest mainstream kernel as I prefer to do that rather than use the supplied Mandrake kernel. I'm not sure how good the k8powernow code in that kernel is. On top of the standard kernel source I downloaded the latest ACPI patches from the ACPI4Linux web site and installed them. The reason for this was to try to get standby, suspend to memory and suspend to disk to work. None of them currently work. Standby never goes to sleep, suspend to memory causes the machine to lock up when coming out of sleep and suspend to disk doesn't recognise the saved disk image.

Once you've compiled your new kernel with Opteron/Athlon64 optimisations and the full powernow system set as being compiled into the kernel you will now be able control the power usage using a command such as:-
echo -n powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

(I've set this command as the last thing in /etc/rc.d/rc.local)

You can download my kernel's .config file here.

Broadcom 802.11a/g wireless ethernet

There is no Linux driver for this device due to global political reasons and not because Broadcom doesn't want to make one. Thankfully, there is a solution to this problem in the x86-32 world.. use ndiswrapper and the normal Windows XP driver available from the Acer support website. If you follow the instructions to the letter it's a trivial matter to install this driver. I was surprised how easy it was and how well it worked. You'll need to recompile and install every time you recompile the kernel. Note: The Broadcom NDIS driver needs the full ACPI system to be installed and running, the boot option of acpi=ht is not good enough and the module will fail to load.

Synaptics mousepad

The standard 2.6.x kernel has a generic driver for all PS/2 and USB mice which has Synaptics mousepad support. However, this is absolutely terrible! Hence, it's a good idea to download and install a specialist driver for XFree86. It gives you all those things you miss such as tap-and-drag etc. It's pretty easy to install as long as you don't mind modifying the XFree86 config file.

ATI graphics card

This one's easy.. Go to the ATI support web page and download the driver for the FireGL, extract, run the install script. Just remember that you'll have to recompile and install the driver everytime you upgrade the kernel, you'll find the source and install scripts in /lib/modules/fglrx.

You can download my XF86Config-4 file from here.

Application keys

You can download and install the Acer Hokey Driver but I'm not sure how useful it is.

Intel 537 AC'97 softmodem.

Although Intel do supply a Linux driver for this modem it only supports the 2.4.x kernel. It says that it also supports the early pre-release 2.6 kernels but it won't compile under the current versions. There are rumours that the next release of this code may happen by the end of June 2004 but I'd not hold my breath if I were you.
I've now tried the Smart Link soft modem. They only have an unsupported version for the 2.6 kernel. The results are mixed. The modem will dial out OK but doesn't properly negotiate with the remote modem.

Winbond 3-in-1 SD/MMC/MemoryStick interface

This device is part of the same chip as the thermal monitoring system. It seems that this is connected via the ISA bus (yes, there is still an ISA bus lurking in a 64 bit PC) using an I2C interface. There are no drivers for Linux and I can't find anyone working on one either.

Document version 1.1, 6th June, 2004. Stephen Usher. steve@lingula.org.uk