Gentoo Linux on Acer TravelMate 2702 Wlmi

My Laptop with Gentoo Linux

Table of contents

• My Laptop with Gentoo Linux
  • Introduction
  • DISCLAIMER.
  • Kernel built-in vs Modules
  • Hotplug & Coldplug
  • Knowing your Hardware (lspci)
  • Acpi
  • TouchPad
  • Sound
  • Graphic Card
  • Network adapter
  • Wireless network adapter
  • CD and DVD reader/writer
  • IrDA
    • SIR Mode
    • FIR mode
  • IrDA Applications

Introduction

I'm trying to make my laptop fully working with Gentoo Linux, I've just had good results thanks to gentoo official forum and to Fabio Piani's guide for the TM2600.

Operating system: Gentoo GNU/Linux stable
Kernel: 2.6.13-gentoo-r5

You can discuss about this page on the Gentoo on Acer forum

DISCLAIMER.

Everything provided on this page is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY of the author(s), without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Use the information in this document at your own risk. I'm not responsible for any damage or loss of your data and/or your computer, direct or indirect, derived by using the information provided on this page.

Kernel built-in vs Modules

My choice for most of the peripherals is to include the support directly in the kernel to make it as much possible monolithic , anyway there are some issues with some periperhals that needs their support be loaded in a different order that the kernel does, in theese cases we are forced to build their support as modules. Furthermore there are some extra modules like ndiswrapper and also proprietary drivers that cannot be compiled built-in.
A case in which is more convenient making a module instead of built-in support is for removable perhiperals which we don't use often like usb flash disks.

Hotplug & Coldplug

Hotplug and Coldplug are much useful as they implements the PnP feature in Linux, so it's a good idea to merge them :
emerge hotplug coldplug
But before we can use them we must enable all the PnP features bult-in in the kernel :
Device Drivers -->
Plug and Play support ---> (enable it all)

and

Bus options (PCI, PCMCIA, EISA, MCA, ISA) --->
PCI Hotplug Support -->
<*> Support for PCI Hotplug (EXPERIMENTAL)
<*> ACPI PCI Hotplug driver

Now we can put them in the boot runlevel :
rc-update add coldplug boot
rc-update add hotplug boot

After rebooting we can test if hotplug/coldplug works listing all modules :
lsmod
We can for example compile the usb mass storage support as module, then we can plug a usb flash disk and if we check the modules, usb-mass-storage (and eventually all its dependencies) will be in the list.

Knowing your Hardware (lspci)

Now the most important thing is to know which hardware you have, so this is the output of lspci :

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP Host Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 9100 IGP AGP Bridge
0000:00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #1 (rev 01)
0000:00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc OHCI USB Controller #2 (rev 01)
0000:00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc EHCI USB Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 1a)
0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI Dual Channel Bus Master PCI IDE Controller
0000:00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 434c
0000:00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4342
0000:00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP150 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
0000:00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc IXP AC'97 Modem (rev 01)
0000:01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS300M AGP Radeon Mobility 9100IGP
0000:02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Linksys, A Division of Cisco Systems AirConn INPROCOMM IPN 2220 Wireless LAN Adapter (rev 01)
0000:02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
0000:02:04.0 CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller (rev 01)


I choose to begin with issues that gave me more problems, others will come soon.
Anyway this is a WIKI so I appreciate everyone who will edit and improve this page.

Acpi

There are some problems with acpi, It's not possible to check battery status, acpi says : "the battery doesn't exist", There is this post on gentoo official forum, I followed the instructions, I downloaded from acpi site the Acer TM2700 dsdt, I choose the "initrd DSDT override" solution.

TouchPad

I followed this guide to make my touchpad work, now only the 4-directional central button doesn't work properly.
In my case the right device is /dev/input/event0, I had a problem to get my touchpad recognized and so I've recompiled my kernel with this configuration:

Device Drivers->Input Device Support:

<*> Event Interface
....
<*> Mice
<M> PS/2 mouse

then I added as last line to my /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 this:
psmouse

and all went fine !

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Sound

It's only a matter of choosing right devices in the kernel configuration and installing alsa:

Sound->Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ->

<*> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
<*> Sequencer support
<*> OSS Mixer API #this ones (OSS ones) are enabled because older programs uses only oss
<*> OSS PCM (digital audio) API
< * > OSS Sequencer API


Sound->Advanced Linux Sound Architecture -> PCI devices

<*> ATI IXP AC97 Controller
<*> ATI IXP Modem

after recompiling the kernel, you must install alsa :

emerge alsa

and I suggest you also to install alsa-utils to save the mixer.

Graphic Card

In order to use fully and correctly our graphic card we must enable in the kernel :

Device Drivers->Graphics Support:

<*> ATI Radeon display support
<*> Backlight & LCD device support --->
<*> Lowlevel Backlight controls
<*> Lowlevel LCD controls

Device Drivers->Character devices --->
<*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<*> ATI chipset support
<*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)
<*> ATI Radeon

Network adapter

This is the card : 0000:02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
so I enabled in the kernel :

Device Drivers -> Networking support -> Ethernet (10 or 100 Mbit)

<*> EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers
<*> RealTek RTL-8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter support

Wireless network adapter

This howto helped me to get my WNA working.

CD and DVD reader/writer

we must enable generic ATAPI cd support so we must enable in the kernel

Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support
<*> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support
<*> Include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support

and cd specific filesystem :

File System -> CD-ROM/DVD Filesystems
<*> ISO 9660 CDROM file system support

here we are, our cd/dvd unit will works also for burning discs in programs which support burning from ATAPI cd/dvdwriter,
I've got no problems with k3b and graveman (my favourites burning programs).

IrDA

I discovered that the IR Port is a SMC chipset based one, so I've read a lot in the web and I found that theese are the more problematic ones. The support in 2.6.29.x kernels is still experimental, smcinit anyway isn't needed because the BIOS can enable the port.
To have a fully working port in FIR mode you must follow also the SIR Mode instructions.

SIR Mode

First of all we must enable (if it's not) the IR port in the bios, (Advanced tab) , because Linux cannot enable it.
Once we reboot we must check if the Serial driver has detected it and what is the right device:
dmesg | grep -n2 Serial
10:Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing disabled
11-ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
The device this time is /dev/ttyS1
If nothing appear probably you didn't compile the serial support in the kernel or you haven't loaded the module, that in this case is :
Device Drivers
-> Character devices
-> Serial drivers
- <M> 8250/16550 and compatible serial support
<M> 8250/16550 PCMCIA device support
* 8250/16550 device discovery via ACPI namespace
(4) Maximum number of 8250/16550 serial ports

Now we must enable IRDA related stuff :
config this part as this topic (point 4) says.
Then load ircomm-tty and irtty-sir :
modprobe ircomm-tty
modprobe irtty-sir

Now we must install irda-utils that will help us to establish connection to irda port and to test it :
emerge irda-utils

Now we must attach our port :
irattach /dev/ttyS1 -s

If all goes well you will see some output after this command :
irdadump

Now that the connection is set we must add ircomm-tty and irtty-sir to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and put in /etc/conf.d/local.start to set-up ir port at every reboot :
irattach /dev/ttyS1 -s
echo 115200 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_baud_rate
echo 2000 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_tx_data_size
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/irda/max_tx_window

FIR mode

I found that is possible to use the port in FIR mode using the module smsc-ircc2 , that can be enabled setting in .config the option CONFIG_SMC_IRCC_FIR="m" , the parameters I found for my port (using bios and windows) are :
dma : enabled (1)
irq : 3
sir : 0x2f8
fir : 0x6f8 <- fast transfer address

so I created a file named /etc/modules.d/irda that contains the following:

#smsc-irda
alias irda0 smsc-ircc2
options smsc-ircc2 ircc-dma=1 ircc-irq=3 ircc-sir=0x2f8 ircc-fir=0x6f8

after that you must run update-modules, and add irda0 to your /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
the module must be loaded BEFORE ircomm-tty and irtty-sir to fully work so insert it in your /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 like this :

[..]
irda0
ircomm-tty
irtty-sir
[..]

IrDA Applications

Now that our port works well we might want to use it to transfer some file, for this purpose we can install :
obexftp
openobex-apps
openobex
ircp*
ircp-tray*


{*}Not in portage

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TODO: X, full kernel config, hdparm config, laptop mode config.

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This guide is linked on :


TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs and mobile phones

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