RedHat Linux on Acer Extensa 712 TEV

This acer had a defekt display-hinges when i got it. The display by itself was okay. Primary for my girlfriend, i used it for a long time, while my Gericom Notebook was on service ;(

Hardware

Device	Description
CPU	Intel Pentium II 300 MHz
Memory	256 MB (2x128)
Video	Neomagic 128XD (NM2160) 2 MB RAM
Harddisk	6GB 4200 rpm Ultra-DMA 33
CD/DVD	6xDVD/24xCD
PCMCIA	2x PCMCIA Slots
Display	14,1 Inch, 1024x768
Sound	ESS Technology ES1968 Maestro 2
Communication	RealTek8139 PCMCIA, int. Winmodem Lucent Chip
Floppy	3,5 Inch Floppy built in
IrDA	Fast IrDA 4MBit

I installed RedHat 7.2 out of the box from DVD, so i can say the drive works well :)

Partitions

Partition	Mountpoint	Size
/dev/hda1	/boot	36MB
/dev/hda2	/	1GB
/dev/hda3	SWAP	140MB
/dev/hda5	/usr	2GB
/dev/hda6	/home	3GB

Xfree86

The graphics-chip and the display where both detected correctly, i choosed the nativ display resolution of 1024x768 as default.
The builtin Mousepad works as a 2 button PS2 mouse, also i added a USB mouse with wheel.

My XF86Config-4 looks like this:
The ServerLayout section contains an entry for the USB mouse:

InputDevice

"Mouse1"

"SendCoreEvents"

I created a Device section for the mouse:

Section	"InputDevice"
Identifier	"Mouse1"
Driver	"mouse"
Option	"Device"	"/dev/input/mice"
Option	"Protocol"	"IMPS/2"
Option	"Emulate3Buttons"	"off"
Option	"ZAxisMapping"	"4 5"
EndSection

Network

I setup a RealTek NIC with 8139 chipset 32-cardbus style.
The card worked well, but (because of it was a PCMCIA) the installer did not enter an entry in the modules.conf file,
this causes the the wrong driver (8139cp) was tried to load, after the first reboot, so the card does not work.
It took a minute to understand what was going on, because at installtime the NIC was correctly detected.
I found the problem in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/modules.pcimap.
The driver wrongly loaded (8139cp) has an entry with the same pci-device-id than a line for the correct 8139too.
I added a static entry to the modules.conf, because i used this card everytime in this notebook
"alias eth0 8139too" and since this time the card works well.

The internal Winmode

The Winmodem requires a package called lt-modem, which is available from Winmodem Driver download site.
This can be easily installed on RedHat with the build_rpm-script from the source-package.
After that, the package is located in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386, you can install with the rpm -Uhv command
Creates in /etc/modules.conf an new entry for loading a module called ltmodem,
the /dev/ttyS14 will be used as communication port to the modem, so it can you can communicate via AT command set.

The notebook has been upgraded from 64MB to 256MB of RAM. This improves extremly the speed.
The battery runs fine for more than 120 minutes. Standard-apm settings works fine for me.
I enjoid this laptop for a long time and it was realy good to use.

The following files are available for info:

File	shell command
Memory Info	cat /proc/meminfo
CPU Info	cat /proc/cppuinfo
PCI Info	lspci -v -v
XFree86 Logfile	cat /var/log/Xfree86.0.log (on RedHat)
Partition Information	fdisk -l /dev/hda
Interrupt Info	cat /proc/interrupts
Dmesg output on startup	dmesg

Back to Laptopoverview Site