Various notes about Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi with Linux

This page has random notes about using Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi with Linux. It also contains stuff that lead to nowhere.

Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi with Linux has the important and usefull stuff. Go there to get your Travelmate working. Most of the fixes on this page have been included in Ubuntu Dapper 6.06, and work out of the box.

Using Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi (Travelmate 3000 -series) with Ubuntu Linux Breezy 5.10. Now installer can read CDROM! This article is not a howto, it only documents my inital impressions.

Ubuntu Breezy can be installed on Travelmate, but it does not work well. Does not work: ACPI, battery meter, correct resolution for widescreen display, mouse scroll buttons, sound. Display should be easy to fix.

Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi command outputs

Boot computer from Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger Install CD. Use boot loader arguments:

 linux noapic nolapic acpi=off vga=771 pci=noacpi

Computer freezes and on top of a black screen there is written something like “Uncompressing Linux...”.

This is an APIC / LAPIC related kernel panic, caused by buggy ACPI in Acer Travelmate BIOS. I have noticed this on Acer v 3B07 (06/08/05) BIOS, but many pages on the net report similar problems on other BIOS revisions and other Acers. One of my students said his Toshiba laptop had a similar problem.

Boot with “noapic nolapic” boot loader (kernel) parameters as described above.

Installer complains “no common cd-rom was detected”. Because the error message comes from the installer that was loaded from cdrom, this seems a bit funny. Also, network is not detected, so network installation is not possible. Reported in Ubuntu Bug #21860.

In installed systems, you might see a message while loading: “Starting hotplug subsystem”, “Disabling IRQ #10”, “Disabling IRQ #11”.

Boot with “pci=noacpi” or even “acpi=off”. You won’t have ACPI power saving, but the external Firewire DVD-drive and network will work. On at least installed system, “linux pci=noacpi” seems to be enough.

Use Ubuntu Dapper instead, see above.

With Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 Live CD, boot fails with default setup. Computer freezes and on top of a black screen there is written something like “Uncompressing Linux...”.

Computer boots with boot loader arguments:

 linux noapic nolapic acpi=off vga=771 pci=noacpi

Does not work yet.

ACPI4Linux DSDT for ACER Travelmate 3000. “Features: tested on kernel-2.6.11-gentoo-r3 and kernel-2.6.12-rc6, Gentoo 2005.0. this DSDT will make the battery status (/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state) usable.” http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/view.php?id=387

If you boot with boot loader arguments “linux noapic nolapic acpi=off vga=771 pci=noacpi”, wired ethernet and external DVD drive work. The problem described below is only shown when booting with just enough boot loader arguments to make it boot past the “Uncompressing Linux...”, but not enough to make hardware work (eg “linux noapic nolapic”).

Ubuntu Live still does not load desktop, because it cannot find the external Firewire DVD drive after initial booting. Minimal shell “ash” can be opened from dialog menu.

Maybe files could be loaded from a USB mass storage key? Tested with a 250 GB Lacie USB drive and I was able to mount it. I used Ubuntu Dapper Flight3 (beta version) with boot option (F4) “noapic”, after failing to read cdrom I executed a shell. Note that USB devices must be connected on boot, or /dev/sda* are not automatically created (you might be able to create them with mknod also)

$ ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2
$ cd mnt
$ mkdir usb1
$ mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb1
$ ls /mnt/usb1

I was able to read files from the USB drive. Now it is possible to copy files from outside the laptop (and cdrom boot loader) using only Linux. Next probably should copy some files to usb drive and see if Ubuntu can be installed from files other than cdrom (expert mode?).

Two first partitions of internal 100 GB drive are accessible.

On Ubuntu Live 5.10: Run the installer, choose language and location, fail the detect cd-rom. When you get a menu of installation steps, choose “Execute shell” (ash)

# mkdir /mnt/
# cd /mnt/
# mkdir hda1 hda2
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

Strangely, the “-t vfat” is required or mount fails.

Now that I can access the internal hard drive, how can I tell the installer to read the files from the hard drive and not a cdrom?

On Debian Sarge NON_US CD #1, you can answer installation questions until you get the menu and can exit to shell. Then you can mount the partitions like above, except that no “-t vfat” is needed.

Debian Sarge DVD #1 did not boot. Knoppix 3.7 did not boot. FIRE did not boot :gettys respawning too fast, then alt-ctrl-del: could not execute /sbin/shutdown. FIRE failed both X and text mode.

On Fedora Core 4 Rescue CD: No driver found - unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type. (When asked to use local cdrom on starting rescue cd).

Fixed! Booted with Breezy Badger Install CD: “linux noapic nolapic acpi=off vga=771 pci=noacpi”. Thanks to whoever wrote the entry about Travelmate 4100 LMI at 2005-11-07 on HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsAcer. Knoppix 3.7 boots with these parameters too.

The model of the external firewire DVD-RW drive is displayed for a very short time in boot, if “quiet boot” is disabled from BIOS. It is “SlimType DVD RW SOSW-852S”.

Bug #21860 in cdrom-detect (Ubuntu): "/dev/cdroms symlinks missing for SCSI (IDE SATA) CD-ROM (Acer TM4151)" - this seems to be the main bug on not finding cdrom drive.

Bug #21907 in cdrom-detect (Ubuntu): "CD-ROM not detected" duplicate of 15642 Duplicate of bug #21860 “cdroms symlinks missing”. Duplicate of #15642 “changes from Debian”.

Bug #15642 in gcc-3.4 (Ubuntu): "gcc-3.4: new changes from Debian require merging"

Bug #24501 in Ubuntu: "No hdd & cdrom found in netinst of Ubuntu 5.10 - Acer TM 1451"

“Optical Drive - Slimtype DVDRW SOSW-852S: CD-RW / DVD+RW / DVD-RW (24W / 10RW / 2.4W / 4RW / 8DVD) Working - Burnt a 590MB CD in about 5 minutes. Have not yet burnt any DVDs.” [Ubuntu Linux 4.10 Warty on a Mecer N223II Notebook] http://www.durbanet.co.za/colin/mecer-linux/mecer_n223ii_notebook_ubuntu_linux.html

Bug #6157 in Ubuntu: "Latest Dapper: CD-ROM broken on Compaq Presario M2000": The cdrom driver is loaded, but there is some sort of conflict when loading cdrom: .. ide0: BM-DMA at 0×1810-0×1817, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio .. ide1: BM-DMA at 0×1818-0x181f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio .. ide0: I/O resource 0x3F6-0x3F6 not free. .. ide1: failed to initialize IDE interface .. the piix driver?

Bug #2709 in debian-installer (Ubuntu): "during 5.10 install on thinkpad can't find CDROM and then failed": display “irq #15 nobody care” and can’t find CDROM, with “irqpoll” works by upgrade from 5.04 (except wlan), but freeze by installation

See also:

http://www.linux1394.org/faq.php#sbp2

http://www.linux1394.org/sbp2.php

BootFromFirewireHardDisk on Ubuntu wiki “These instructions won’t work, as the Ubuntu kernel does not have the necessary bits compiled in – SCSI, fw support, and sbp-2. See [WWW] http://macubuntu.blogspot.com/ for step-by-step instructions on how to get this to work.” Direct url: http://macubuntu.blogspot.com/2005/11/nailed-howto-install-bootable-mac.html

3004WTMi comes with preinstalled Windows. Following your intuition or the manual that came with the computer, install Windows in English, keep klicking until Acer eManager shows you the external DVD writer, and burn “Factory Default” backup DVD.

Without this DVD, it might be very difficult to copy anything to hard drive when the pre-installed Windows breaks.

Snippets from page https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/base-installer/+bug/26405

Bug #26405 in base-installer (Ubuntu): “problems to install Ubuntu 5.10 in my Acer Travelmate 4151lci Laptop”

It boots from the CD Drive perfectly but when it comes to detecting and mounting [the installation cd-rom], i get an error message that says ‘no common cd-rom was detected’ and asks if i want to load drivers from a floppy. Of course, i don’t have floppy drive and so I can’t proceed the instalation. lucastorri 2005-11-30

Worked fine with SuSE 10.0 GM lucastorri at 2005-12-17

I have the same problem with a Travelmate 210TEV. vincenzo di somma 2005-12-19

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/base-installer/+bug/26405

I (Tero) added Travelmate 3000 to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportMachinesLaptopsAcer

Update: Finally found an official Acer ftp server where things are in sensible order: ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/travelmate_3000/

Acer website is horrible, popup windows and “click here” links, dropdown menus replacing links - they have it all.

User manual as a PDF: Doesn’t make linking easy, find it from: http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/tm3000.htm

Drivers: http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/tm_3000.html

Utilities: http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/utilities.html

Specs (Finland): Acer uses some long randomized urls that can’t be bookmarked easily, must manually find Acer Travelmate 3000 link. http://www.acer.fi/

Quoting http://www.baycom.org/~tom/acertm3004wtmi/ :

The worst problem is the interrupt controller problem. The BIOS assigns all high speed IO devices (LAN, WLAN, Firewire, USB) to interrupts 10 and 11.

There are numerous problems to get Fedora Core 4 working on an Acer Travelmate 3004WTMi, namely:

• Interrupt Controller: XT-PIC vs IOAPIC
• Broken ACPI DSDT prevents battery state information
• Synaptics Touchpad Detection
• x.org i810 Driver
• Patch for the Sigmatel Codec
• VBIOS patch needed for 1280×800 resolution

Because no high speed IO devices work with the standard kernel and thus with the installation kernel, I found no other easy way than to copy the installation images plus the above RPM packages to the internal harddisk (eg. by using the preinstalled Windoze).

Page also contains patches and RPMs to get 3004WTMi working on Fedora Core 4.

http://www.baycom.org/~tom/acertm3004wtmi/

Tero 2006-03-16: This works, I can hear sounds!

theefrit a gmail.com sent me quick feedback:

Hi! I have a travelmate 3002 and I m running successfully Ubuntu Linux 6.04 Flight 5 w o recompiling kernels or other stuff. My boot options for the kernel are

  ro quiet splash noapic acpi=on irqpoll pci biosirq 

I have also ACPI, sound, bluetooth and I m testing the hibernate function, but it s still not working.

Quoting holster a iki fi http://nurkka.org/linux_on_travelmate_3210/ :

Ubuntu Linux on Acer TravelMate 3210

Only thing needing a bit tweaking was the X server: the LCD screen stays blank until you insert Option “MonitorLayout” “LVDS,NONE” in the Device section of your xorg.conf.

Suspend and hibernate modes both do work. However, when using suspend, sometimes keyboard is locked on resume. Hibernation (suspend-to-disk) works fine. Speedstep-centrino module doesn’t load (”Device or resource busy”). CPU frequence scaling and throttling works via speedstep-acpi module, though. I guess the centrino module would save even more power (currently ~2.5 h on battery).

http://nurkka.org/linux_on_travelmate_3210/

3002WTCi, with fix for sound.

http://blog.lizhao.net/2005/08/softwarerec-install-ubuntu-on-acer.html

ablepsia.net reports success with Travelmate 3002, another Debian-based distro and these boot params:

 irqpoll
 pci=biosirq

and to make firewire cdrom work:

 noacpi
 acpi=off
 noapic

“also sound runs now out of the box with snd-hda-intel”

“WLan is working fine - using modprobe param led=1 also the led is used. For usage of wpa it is still recommended to use wpasupplicant. "

http://ablepsia.net/linux/linux_grml.shtml

No need to recompile the kernel to replace DSDT in Ubuntu:

$ sudo cp DSDT.aml /etc/mkinitramfs/
$ sudo mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-2.6.12-9-amd64-k8.fixed
$ sudo cp initrd.img-2.6.12-9-amd64-k8.fixed /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-amd64-k8.fixed

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~weckerl/ferrari_ubuntu_64.html#acpi

Tero: I tried this but it did not work for me. HAL improvements will fix this by adding support to smartbattery.

note: you will need to compile iasl from source too. It uses flex to generate the scanner. Unfortunately, the current flex version (2.5.31) on ubuntu is buggy. You will need 2.5.4. http://blog.lizhao.net/2005/08/softwarerec-install-ubuntu-on-acer.html

#!/bin/bash
# (c) 2006-01-27 Tero Karvinen
# See also sailer-fc4/915resolution.initscript
 
echo -n $"Starting 915resolution: "
sudo ./915resolution 38 1280 800
sudo ./915resolution 49 1280 800
sudo ./915resolution 58 1280 800

# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man /etc/X11/xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
#   sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "Files"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi"
	FontPath	"/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi"
	# path to defoma fonts
	FontPath	"/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	Load	"bitmap"
	Load	"ddc"
	Load	"dri"
	Load	"extmod"
	Load	"freetype"
	Load	"glx"
	Load	"int10"
	Load	"type1"
	Load	"vbe"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Generic Keyboard"
	Driver		"kbd"
	Option		"CoreKeyboard"
	Option		"XkbRules"	"xorg"
	Option		"XkbModel"	"pc105"
	Option		"XkbLayout"	"fi"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Configured Mouse"
	Driver		"mouse"
	Option		"CorePointer"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/input/mice"
	Option		"Protocol"		"ExplorerPS/2"
	Option		"Emulate3Buttons"	"true"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
	Driver		"synaptics"
	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/psaux"
	Option		"Protocol"		"auto-dev"
	Option		"HorizScrollDelta"	"0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Generic Video Card"
	Driver		"i810"
	BusID		"PCI:0:2:0"
	VideoRam	128000
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Generic Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"
	HorizSync	30-67
	VertRefresh	30-60
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Device		"Generic Video Card"
	Monitor		"Generic Monitor"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		1
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		4
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		8
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		15
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		16
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1280x800"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	"Default Layout"
	Screen		"Default Screen"
	InputDevice	"Generic Keyboard"
	InputDevice	"Configured Mouse"
	InputDevice	"Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Mode	0666
EndSection

Grab BIOS update from Acer ftp server ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/travelmate_3000/