ubuntu 5.04 on acer aspire 2026 wlmi

it works out of the box. really !! sound, wide screen, wlan, speedstep ... it simply works. WOW !! Of course the details dont work ;) like irda, suspend ... but I’ll catch them all in time. so stay tuned ;)

There are various installation-guides for acer laptops on linux. This is the first for the 2026 but there are others for similar laptops to look on. Just google.

I never used a debian-based system and this is why I tried ubuntu, cause I wanted to try debian. I still fight hard with the packaging-system and compiling my own kernel with make-kpkg made me almost mad, so I reverted to good old make bzImage and make modules.

Its a ATI RADEON MOBILITY 9600 and ubuntu comes with a driver for it, which has 2D-acceleration and not 3D. ATI has a proprietary driver for it with 3D-acc enabled. I dont think I need it, but of course I wanted to install it.

Note that ubuntu does not use XFree but X.ORG as X-server.

There is a page http://www.stanchina.net/~flavio/debian/fglrx-installer.html which describes configuring the kernel and modules for the ati-drivers on debian. it did not work for me. And finally I lost patience and compiled my own 2.6.10-kernel (at least from the linux-source-package), installed it with grub, booted it and then downloaded the ati-installer from https://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=1176 and started it. Voila. about 20 seconds later I had a working fglrx-module !! the ati-installer copies it to the kernel in a different directory than the debian-based installer from flavio does. so be sure to check that there is only one and that it is the correct one.

ATI recommends to run the fglrxconfig to get a new xorg.conf, but I prefered to follow the recommendations on the mentioned page from flavio and did exactely the changes I was told there. Then I rebooted the system and things worked.

fgl_glxgears gives me about 412FPS which is pretty cool.

Unfortunately I’m still not able to compile the module under 2.6.12. Note that the ati-installer removes old modules during install even if it fails to create a new module and it even removes the module from different kernel-versions which seems very rude. It even removes it, if you rename it to *.ok or something.

its a intel 2200bg-based wlan-device and there is a module ipw2200 that comes with standard linux-kernel. The wireless card worked out of the box with ubuntu, but it did not work after I compiled my own kernel. Reason is that the hotplug firmware can deal with different firmwares for different kernels and this ubuntu-guys take this very serious, so the ipw2200-firmwares all have the kernel-version and revision added to the name. ipw-2.2.boot.fw-2.6.10-5-686. So the firmware-agent does not find the firmware when I boot with my 2.6.10-kernel. You need to create a symlink of all ipw-2.2 modules with your kernel-version or just plain name without any version/revision which is then used by the firmware-agent.

Otherwise you will get nasty errors.

note that the ipw2200-code is not included in the vanilla-kernels (the official ones). you need to download and compile the module and firmware from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/#downloads. Version 1.0.4 is recommended, cause it adds monitor-mode. To compile the module against 2.6.12-kernel you need to apply a patch. please look at : http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7552069&forum_id=38938

Otherwise make will complain about “redefinition of is_multicast_ether_addr” and quit with an error.

http://www.suspend2.net seems to be the source of enlightment here. Unfortunately it did not work for me, but I’m still working on it.

hibernating works with suspend2 to swap and even with acpi-sleep. But I cant recover. The resume2-option is ignored and when recovering from acpi-sleep the system is dead (at least the graphic is)

thats a hard one :) I didnt manage to produce any verifyable result. the chipset is an smsc-chipset (at least this is what windows tells me) but the corresponding module smsc-ircc2 does not load (note that you need to enable the ISA-bus in your kernel-options to even be able to compile this module)

SIR should work out of the box but it does not and FIR neither. I found sources in google that were able to make irda run on acer-laptops with the same chipset, so there is still hope for the encouraged.