I just got the new Acer Aspire 9503 WLMi from a local supermarket in France for 999 Euros, I thought that was such a good price I persuaded my wife she could buy it me for christmas. Of course it came preinstalled with a French version of windows xp home edition, so before it could be wrapped up as a present the first job was to junk that and put something I am a lot happier using on. And I am not French by origin, and am more comfortable in the english language versions of things.. And of course now Im using it in place of a old p2 xe2, I dont want to wait so here I am..
|
Hardware
Components
|
Status
under Linux
|
Notes
|
| CPU | Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| 17.4 WXGA+ CrystalBrite TFT LCD | Works | Install had to be ran in non graphical (curses) mode as the installer detected the display settings wrong and it was completely corrupt. Once I had installed the os, I managed to get X to display using a custom xorg.conf which you can find here. Note Im sure there is improvements in timings, refresh and modes availible, if you improve it please let me know! Ill post changes to the xorg.conf each time I tweak it a bit more.
Using 915resolution which is a tool to interrogte/modify transiently the resolutions availible, in the video bios the following 32 bit modes are availible :- 640x480 800x600 1024x768, 1280x1024
I have used 915resolution to patch the modes availible in a attempt to access the widescreen modes, and whilst I have suceeded in getting a widescreen layout, this has also been accompanied by odd video crashes during video playback. I believe the lcd is capable of 1440x900 at 60hz refresh. You can find my experimental xorg.conf here |
| Intel 915GM | Works | Installation has picked it up as a vesa card. This means it currently isnt accelerated but I plan to take a look at configuring it as a 915 soon. Update - I have accelerated intel i810 xorg server up and working. The steps I took were to compile xorg 6.8.99 from source. To do this you need the kernel sources installed and built to be able to compile xorg sucessfully. I installed the kernel source then did a make oldconfig. glxgears is currently running in the background fullscreen at around 220fps and there are no longer any problems with dvd playback speed. Once the server was in and configured I switched back to the original fedora supplied kernel due to issues with my madwifi config which I had also built from source. NOTE, I get a blank display if I start the pcmcia daemon, so I have removed pcmcia from all the runlevels until I can figure out why. Ill split this section out soon when I get everything how I want it. |
| 512MB, DDR RAM, 2DIMMs | Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| 80 GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive | Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| Integrated Network Card Broadcom Corporation Realtek RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet | Works | I havent verified the 1000b performance as my lan is only 100bt. |
| Internal Wireless Networking Atheros 802.11 b/g | working with tweaks | Not detected at install, but once the madwifi package was installed it was picked up automatically. Installed the mad wifi with just a "yum install madwifi" as root |
| Internal 56k Modem | Unknown | On my list of rainy day things to tinker with |
| DVD/CD-RW Slot Burner |
Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| Battery | Works | No special procedure required during installation. Status working fine too |
| Intel 82801 Audio | Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| Touchpad | Works | My xorg.conf does seem to improve the feel of it, over the automatically installed settings. For xorg.conf-experiemental I have disabled mouse clicks on the keypad as I found it annoying to navigate in firefox and use the pad too. |
| IEEE 1494 Firewire | Working fine | I just got out my old thompson miniDV camera and bought a firewire lead. I found I had to issue a "/bin/mknod -m 600 /dev/raw1394 c 171 0" before the avc controls worked under kino or dvgrab. |
| Infrared | Unknown | Started to tinker with lirc, in a bid to get the remote control working, only to discover the remote works at a hardware level and not via the IR and was already functional |
| Remote control | Working | This works out the box, since it works at a hardware level I believe. Some of the special keycodes it generates are not mapped in the default install (eg the arcade button generates e012) so these will have to be mapped in appropriately. |
| Intergrated Bluetooth | Unknown | Sorry my laptop doesnt have the intergrated bluetooth module, something that I hope to recitify in the near future. |
| S-video/TV-out (NTSC/PAL) | Unknown | Not looked at it yet. |
| USB 2.0 | Works | No special procedure required during installation. |
| 6 in 1 Cardreader (SM/MS/MS-Pro/MMC/SD/xD-Picture card) | Unknown | This is a ENE technology pci card reader, as opposed to the more normal usb device. I have been researching the reader under other laptops fitted with the same hardware, and although ENE technology have been contacted, at this stage no further information has been made availible. |
| Type II PC-Card | Working | I ran a prism2 wifi card in it until I figured out the madwifi stuff, so all is fine out the box, however since using the i810 xorg server, the display blanks during initialization, this does not apply if you are using the vesa server. |
| Various Buttons | Working | The special keys on the remote show keycodes that arent mapped anywhere so these just need mapping to the appropriate X signal, however the 4 by the power button do not generate keycodes.
To see these buttons you will need the acerhk package. This can be found at http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~tauber/acerhk/, where it is possible to obtain a rpm version for the fedora core 4 kernel that I am running
(2.6.14-1.1637_FC4) , I had to insmod it with the parameters force_series=6000 as this forces DRITEK chipset compatibility, once the module is loaded keycodes were being displayed in the /var/log/messages logfile. I then simply ran acme to map these keys to events under gnome. Olaf has added the 9503 to his database, but unfortunately the device does not have a model string to make automagical detection work, threfore the force_series=6000 is still required. Olaf also suggeted that this model has a mail light, and to try using force_series=1800 which should give control over the mail led, however I have not devoted any time except a quick test which did not work |
Last updated: 19/12/2005
Contact me :- Phil Parsons