Debian sarge sur acer aspire 1650

Installation of debian sarge on an acer aspire 1650
by rémy Malgouyres

Update : In installed the stable version of etch, and everything works fine, including ACPI,
and the wireless card ipw2200. For the sound, I had to install alsa and configure
it with alsaconf.

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portable1# lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. Mobile Memory Controller Hub PCI Express Port (rev 03)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 04)
0000:00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 04)
0000:00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 04)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 04)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801 PCI Bridge (rev d4)
0000:00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 04)
0000:00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 04)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801FBM (ICH6M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 04)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 04)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 04)
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5460
0000:06:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8031
0000:06:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)
0000:06:08.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 02)

Net install
I made an install with a minimum install CD for i386.
start with the following option:
linux26 noapic acpi=off pnpbios=off
I left these options in /boot/grub/menu.lst

ACPI doesn't work

I couldn't make the ACPI work, which means that power autonomy is limitted with batteries,
This also means that I couldn't activate the wireless card using ACPI.

Installing kernel headers

To make graphic acceleration work with ATI Radeon x300, or to get wifi,
we have to install the kernel headers using apt-get install (package kernel-headers-2.6.8-2-386 in my case).
Since I was a beginner, I used a method similar to this page to build
a new 2.6.8 kernel, (which also works)

CD/DVD+RW works

Add the corresponding line in the file /etc/fstab
You can create a link
portable1# ln -s /media/cdrom0 /cdrom
in order to be able to
portable1# mount /cdrom
to mount the CD/DVD drive

To burn a CD type
portable1# cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=/dev/hdb -data image.iso
as sudoer.

To burn a DVD type
growisofs -Z /dev/hdb -R -J /nom/du/repertoire/a/graver
as root.

Audio works

portable1# modprobe snd_ac97_codec

The module intel8x0 must have been selected in the kernel options (I use makemenuconfig).

We can add the line
snd_ac97_codec
in the file /etc/modules in order to have the module loaded at startup.

Graphic acceleration works

I recompiled the driver fglrx to make the l'ATI radeon x300 work, following the
instructions of this page.

We can know if acceleration works with glxinfo which should display the following line:
direct rendering: Yes

Wifi humm...

The driver of the Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless 2200BG is called ipw2200 and is available from sourceforge.net
Note that the source can be obtained by
portable1# apt-get install ipw2200-source
Then we install the module with
portable1# module-assistant a-i ipw2200
We finally download the firmware from sourceforge.net and put the .fw files in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware
Restart.
The problem is the switch on the side of the aspire 1650 to activate
the wireless card. This switch (called a hotkey) isn't recognized by linux
(dmesg |grep ipw2200 indicates that "radio frequency kill switch is on").
At the time I write this page, the soft acerhk which enables us to use hotkeys
on acer laptops doesn't support Aspire 1650.
I couldn't activate my wireless card. Please le me know if you suceed.
I also tried ndiswrapper without success.

My solution for wireless connection

I bought a wireless USB adapter with RALINK chipset
(the ) which works with the driver
rt2570 the sources of which can be downloaded from the website of RALINK.
This works fine with WEP encryption (which is fine for me).

Nouveau : See my page network configuration with debian

Note on stability

My system was unstable when I logged out and in again.
(I presume it was due to the fglrx driver of the ATI video card)
I had to configure gdm to restart the xserver
at logout)

In the file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf I set the option

#AlwaysRestartServer=false
AlwaysRestartServer=true