OpenSuSE 10.1 on the Acer Travelmate 4002LMi

After eleven months of using SuSE 9.3 on our notebook computers it was time to get an update. So I installed OpenSuSE 10.1.

Most things worked right out of the box such as

• graphics (including dualhead which is required to connect our beamer, the proprietary ATI driver works as well),
• sound,
• ethernet,
• firewire,
• wireless LAN (however we had to switch back to profiles and the classic ifup method since the new Network Manager refused to find the school’s hidden wireless network after connecting to a different network).

I had to do some manual configuration on the ACPI settings as the battery status couldn’t be read by the standard setup. So I downloaded https://sourceforge.net/projects/sbs-linux/ and compiled a valid DSDT file which I inserted into the ASPI_DSDT field in the /etc/sysconfig/kernel configuration file followed by issueing mkinitrd.

cat /proc/acpi/dsdt > dsdt.dat
iasl -d dsdt.dat
patch < acer-tm4xxx-sbs-cm.diff
iasl dsdt.dsl
cp DSDT.aml /etc/dsdt

Things I haven’t tested include

• the S-Video port,
• PCMCIA,
• bluetooth (a USB bluetooth sticks worked instantly but the built-in bluetooth hardware was not recognized and I haven’t had time to see what’s happening there).

I have not been able to get the built-in softmodem to work. I can issue AT commands, but nothing happens at the port. Any suggestions would be highly welcome.

A software-related surprise was a rather incomplete version of Audacity on the OpenSuSE installation as well as the packman archive. I hope this will improve soon. Also microphone recordings have to be set to 48000 Hz now.

So how do I like the Acer Travelmate 4002LMi so far?
I cannot complain about its Linux compatibility, the only gripe I have would be with the material used for its casing. The plastic near the hinges tends to break (see photo) since it cannot handle the tension it gets exposed to when the top of the computer is opened or closed. The hinge itself remains intact. So far the plastic has already been damaged in 25 of 34 Travelmates at our school and it took Acer six weeks to get it repaired. This is really annoying.