A review of Ubuntu Linux installed on an Acer TravelMate 290 laptop

by Aurelien Botman, July 2005
Published on www.botmanfamily.net/~aurelien/articles.

Abstract

This document describes briefly my experience of having installed Ubuntu Linux on a PC-laptop (model Acer TravelMate TM290LCi), focusing especially on the methods used to get the various hardware components to function correctly or at least reasonably. Although it is therefore quite specific to the TM290 model, it is hoped that some parts of this document will be helpful to owners of similar laptops considering installing the Linux operating system.

Table of Contents

  1. Why Ubuntu?
  2. First steps: preparing the laptop
  3. Details of the Acer TM290LCi hardware
  4. Hard disk setup
  5. Ubuntu installation
  6. Graphical display environment
  7. Result - what works and what doesn't
  8. Final notes and further reading

Why Ubuntu?

Some time ago I wrote an article [1] which described my experiences in installing Gentoo Linux on my laptop. (It also went a little into the rationale I had for wanting a dual-boot system.) However, after a few months of low usage, I was in favour of ditching the installation. There were two main reasons:

  • The automatic system updating tool, emerge, completely broke my system three times, each time requiring delicate repair operations going into the intricacies of gcc, libc, and other core system components. One of the breakage causes was reported in 2002. That's a 3-year-old critical bug which has not been fixed yet.
  • The updates were taking between 6 and 12 hours to re-compile everything.
I therefore decided that Gentoo was not suitable for laptops, and started looking for an alternative. I was not in the mood at the time for a "complex" distribution so I went for what everyone seemed to be raving about, Ubuntu, to see what all the fuss was about.

First steps: preparing the laptop

(Copied verbatim from [1].)

The very first thing to be considered is what to do if, during the installation process, all the data which is currently on the laptop is somehow destroyed. This is a real possibility - a single wrong letter or number input can easily result in tragedy. I not only mean physical data or documents, I also mean things like Windows itself. What if all the data was irrecoverably lost? What if the laptop was basically unusable for hours or even days while the mistake is repaired?

Usually (such as in my case, for example) the answer simply consists of making a complete backup of all the data plus having the Windows original CDs nearby, but sometimes other steps also need to be taken before starting can even be considered.

The next step is deciding what type of Linux is going to be installed and whether the system should be built as a dual-boot or not. In my case I wanted a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows system, but the rest of this document is also generally valid for single-boot and other Linux distributions.

The last step, and one which helps enormously later, is making a list of all the hardware known to be connected to the laptop. By this I mean processor type, amount of physical memory, sound card details, USB bridge type, graphics adapter details, ... any information that can be obtained about the system will ultimately be useful at some point.

Details of the Acer TM290LCi hardware

This is, as far as I have been able to determine, the hardware setup of the TM290 laptop. Various sub-models will have different variations, of course.

Processor: Intel Pentium M 1.3Ghz (instruction set equivalent to Pentium 4)
Memory: 512Mb DDR SDRAM
Root Device: 30Gb Ultra ATA/100 HDD (see next section)
Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82852/855GM Host Bridge
Display: 1024x768@60Hz VGA LCD driven by Intel 855GM with 32Mb shared RAM
USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M)
USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB 2.0 EHCI Controller
PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge
ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller
IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801DBM (ICH4) Ultra ATA Storage Controller
SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller
Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller
Modem: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller
FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller
Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+
Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter
CardBus bridge: ENE Technology Inc CB1410 Cardbus Controller

Hard disk setup

The Acer TM290 comes with its disk pre-formatted into three partitions: drives C and D (both fat32, the former later reconverted to ntfs), and the enigmatic "AcerData" (fat16) whose contents are not accessible from Windows. Presumably the latter contains Acer-specific items such as hardware serial codes (the contents could theoretically be viewed under Linux by mounting the partition correctly, but I have not investigated yet).

When I had installed the first dual-boot system (RedHat 9), I had opted to move all the Windows data to drive C, and split drive D into a /boot partition and an LVM containing further partitions. One of the LVM-contained partitions I made windows-visible again as D. This whole repartitioning avoided my losing any data, and was performed by Disk Druid contained on the RedHat installation CD. Thus my hard disk now looks like:

/hda
    /hd1   bootable 20Gb   ntfs      Windows XP (C:)
    /hd2            102Mb  ext3      /boot
    /hd3
	    /hd5        5Gb    reiserfs  /
	    /hd6        512Mb  swap      swap
	    /hd7        5Gb    fat32     Music (D:)
    /hd4            8Mb    fat16     ACERDATA

This results in 25Gb for Windows, and 5.6Gb for Linux. Oddly, 5Gb is ample for Linux whereas Windows struggles with the 25Gb once SP2 and a few basic packages such as Office are installed. The D drive was not converted to ntfs as C was, in order to provide a partition which could to some extent be shared by both Linux and Windows. The main use of this transfer partition, besides holding documents being worked on in both environments, is to house a common music collection.

Ubuntu installation

Setting the system up for the Ubuntu installation was really straightforward. The Ubuntu ISO image for i386 was downloaded under Windows, the image was burned to the disk using NTI CD-Recorder, the CD was left in the tray and the system was rebooted. The CD was not booted up with the -nokeymap option since the Debian installer provides an opportunity later to set this correctly. The hda5 partition was re-initialised to reiserfs (effectively erasing the previous Gentoo system) but the hda2 partition was not touched as that already held a valid GRUB (which would later be automatically updated by the installer).

At this point a surprise was encountered: the installer detected, and used, the wifi device (IPW2100 from Intel)! Let me stress how surprising that was: in all of the previous distributions getting wifi to work was hard work which required several hours even once the procedure was known. Here, it worked out-of-the-box. Ubuntu is therefore the best distribution for this laptop, no hesitations!

The installation proper took around 45 minutes in total, after which the system was ready the first reboot. Thereafter it was a matter of minutes before I was booted into Gnome and could start using the system. Ten minutes later the auto-updater had finished installing the latest security patches without any intervention on my part.

Graphical display environment

Ubuntu Linux uses X.Org rather than XFree86 as the X11 server. Straight after the installation, with no prompting from me, it configured to 1024x768@60 which I happen to know (the hard way, from editing xfree86.conf files) is the best my hardware can give. This is impressive as Ubuntu is the first distribution to correctly detect my display hardware.

Result - what works and what doesn't

After around 1 hour of "work" (I hardly had to do anything), the following functionality has been achieved. Where a function is marked not tested, the reader is referred to the further reading section where references are given to web sites detailing the configuration of such hardware. The most notable result from the table is the unexpected full success of the Wifi driver, the X.org, and the sound.

Hardware Works? Notes
Hard disk yes fine with ntfs (Read-only), fat32, ext3, reiserfs
LCD yes X.Org with 1024x768 at 60Hz, out-of-the-box
Sound card yes out-of-the-box
Ethernet yes out-of-the-box
Wifi (wireless lan 802.11b) yes out-of-the-box
Touchpad yes out-of-the-box (additional functionality requires synaptics driver)
CD reader yes out-of-the-box
CD writer not tested reported to work out-of-the-box if scsi emulation is enabled
Special Acer buttons not tested reported to work with acerhk, acme, xev, lineak
CRT <-> LCD switch not tested reported to work with some effort
Modem not tested reported to work out-of-the-box
System hibernation/sleep half Sleep works, hibernate causes system-wide freeze
CPU frequency scaling yes out-of-the-box
USB 1 & 2 half webcam fails but USB key works
Firewire not tested reported difficult to set up
IrDA yes requires irttyattach and ircp
3D (DRI) probably appears to work, but lack testing tools for full performance analysis

Final notes and further reading

I have shown that with very little time investment and effort it is possible to setup a dual-boot Linux/Windows system on this particular laptop, with reasonable functionality of most hardware. The resulting Linux installation is completely suitable for general use, however it does not make full use of all the hardware features available, or at least it would take some further effort.

The most positive aspect from this experiment for me is that out of all the Linux distributions I have tried so far, Ubuntu Linux has been the easiest to install, the most performing, and the easiest to configure and administer. It is absolutely without doubt the best in terms of user-friendliness and hardware detection. With Ubuntu, Linux is nearly ready for the Desktop (once Gnome becomes more consistent, coherent, and easier to use by computer-phobic people).

Links in the text:
[1] http://www.botmanfamily.net/~aurelien/articles/gentoo_linux_on_acer_tm290_laptop.html

Personal (unofficial) support pages similar to this one:
[2] http://perso.wanadoo.es/jtur/AcerTM290/acertravelmate290.html
[3] http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~mader/tm291.html
[4] http://www.pulia.nu/linux/doc/linux_on_acer_travelmate_290CLi.html

Linux on laptops generally:
[5] http://www.tuxmobile.org/acer.html
[6] http://tuxmobil.org/centrino.html

Acer:
[7] http://www.acer.com/

Ubuntu:
[8] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

Here finishes the article.

Printable version | Copyright Aurelien Botman 2007.