Linux on an AcerNote Light 370PC

My AcerNote Light Multimedia "Nimrod".

I'm currently very happily running Debian 2.1 (kernel 2.0.34) on my AcerNote Light Multimedia (model 370 PC). Although the harddisk isn't particularly big (1.3 GB) I have all the basics I want (including Emacs, perl, gcc, g77, octave, LaTeX) for general use and a bit of programming. I also have installed several specialised astronomy packages (see below). I'm happy to give what ever assistance I am able to anyone who thinks I might be able to help with installing Linux on an Acer laptop, and would be happy to here from anyone who knows of other, or better solutions to some of the problems I discuss below. I can be contaced at Simon.Ellingsen@utas.edu.au

Hardware

Processor : Pentium 133 MMX.
Memory : 48 MB.
Harddisk : 1.3 GB.
Video : Chips & Technologies ct65550.
Sound : ESS1688 PnP AudioDrive.
PCMCIA : TI 1131 Cardbus controller.
Ethernet : 40 BC (NE2000 clone) 10MB ethernet (Twisted pair or Thinwire).
CD : 10x, internal.
Floppy disk : 1.4 MB external.

The Linux installation

Considering that the installation of Debian Linux 1.3.1 on my Acer laptop was my first Linux installation it was a lot less painful than some people had lead me to beleive it would be. I have about 5 years experience administering SunOS and Solaris on small network of Sun workstations, so I have a reasonable working knowledge of Unix which certainly helpped. The initial Linux installation was of Debian 1.3.1, but nearly everything (perhaps with the exception of the PCMCIA problem) probably applies to Debian 2.1 and I expect other Linux distributions. I found the Linux laptop page a very useful source of information when setting up my machine

PCMCIA

The biggest problem I had with the initial installation was getting the PCMCIA controller to work. I doubt that it is a problem any more, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway. The controller for the two PCMCIA slots is a TI 1131 Cardbus controller, which wasn't supported by the version of the PCMCIA utilities on the Debian 1.3.1 installation floppies (2.9.4 I think it might have been). This meant that I couldn't get my network card operating, which meant that I couldn't NFS mount the disk I needed to complete the full installation of all the packages I wanted.

The easy solution would have been to by a CD with the Debian installation and go from there, however, I was too impatient to wait for that to arrive in the mail. Instead I gradually transferred the packages I needed to be able to recompile the kernel with a newer version of the PCMCIA utilites (there were a lot more than I thought there would be) by booting under Windoze 95, FTPing them to my machine, then rebooting under Linux and installing those packages. Through this somewhat tortuous root I eventually was able to recompile the kernel and version 2.9.7 of PCMCIA (which did have TI 1131 support). Once this was done the configuration of PCMCIA and the ethernet card was straight forward, my /etc/pcmcia.conf configuration is here

X11

There were really no problems once I copied the one of the XF86Config files from another Acer user and modified some of the options. I run the 11.3 inch DSTN 800x600 LCD display at 800x600 resolution with 8 bit colour, me XF86Config file is here . I use FVWM2 as my window manager and with panning mode and I find this close enough to the 1024x768 that I wish I had. I briefly tried 16 bit colour, but had a few problems, however, looking at the Acer Extensa 355 entry on the Linux Laptop page someone seems to have solved that problem (if you are will to have 800x590).

Sound

Although not vital for the anything, I wanted to be able to play audio CDs and it was setting up the sound system which gave me the most problems. As far as I can tell the soundcard is an ESS1688 PnP AudioDrive, although when I had Windoze 95 installed it reported it as an OPL3/SAx? The following steps got sound working for me, and are required with all 2.0.X kernel release that I have tried (up to 34).

As it is a PnP card you must use the isapnp package to set up the card during boot (my configuration file is here . Also you have to compile sound as a module as the plug-and-play configuration happens after the sound initialisation in the boot process (if the sound is compiled into the kernel) and sound will not work until you do a soft reboot.
I also had to edit /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound/sound_config.h and add the line "#define NO_SB_IRQ_TEST" before compiling the kernel.
The important kernel configuration options were (NOTE: The MPU401 doesn't work, so I wouldn't pay to much attention to the last 2 in the list) :
- Sound Blaster support - YES
- Generic OPL2/OPL3 FM Synthesiser support - YES
- /dev/dsp and /dev/audio support - YES
- MIDI interface support - YES
- FM synthesiser (YM3812/OPL-3) support - YES
- I/O base for SB - 220
- Sound Blaster IRQ - 5
- Sound Blaster DMA 0, 1 or 3 - 1
- Sound Blaster 16 bit DMA - 5
- MPU401 I/O base of SB16, Jazz and ES1688 - 330
- SB MPU401 IRQ (Jazz16, SM Wave and ES1688) - 9
I had to add the line "exclude irq 5" into my /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file otherwise my network card grabbed it during the boot process (since sound is a module).
The resulting output from "cat /dev/sndstat" is here.

By following these steps I have been able to get /dev/audio working and also to play audio CDs either through the speakers, or headphones. I haven't been able to get the MPU401 to work, something is wrong with the kernel or isapnp configuration, however, I don't know what it does, so I haven't missed it so far. The other remaining problem is that I have very poor volume control, most CDs are too quiet when played through the speakers and only a little better through the headphones, if anyone knows what the problem is any how to get around it I'd be glad to hear.

APM

The advanced power management is designed for Windoze 95 (i.e. they couldn't be bothered to do it properly), but some of the features work under Linux. I haven't been able to get the suspend to work correctly, the machine shuts down for a second or so and then restarts, but power-off on shutdown works OK (I had to change the shutdown flag to -h for Ctrl-Alt-Del in /etc/inittab as well).

Advanced Power Management BIOS support - YES
Ignore USER SUSPEND - NO
Enable PM at boot time - YES
Make CPU Idle calls when idle - NO
Enable console blanking using APM - NO
Power off on shutdown - YES
Watchdog Timer support - NO
Enhanced Real Time Clock support NO

Astronomy software

I'm running the following packages for the analysis of astronomical data.

The full distribution of AIPS (15APR97). With a bit of messing around I managed to get the full distribution of this famous bloatware down to only 120 MB.
Miriad (using shared libraries) only takes up 38.5 MB. There appear to be some problems with compiling some of the tasks with libc6, although I haven't persued this, so they may not be serious.
SPC 3.1.1 the Australia Telescope National Facility spectral line reduction package.

Latest update 22 April 1999
Simon Ellingsen