Acer Ferrari 4000 and Linux/Unix? Anyone try it?

I plan to as soon as I get mine. Probably vlos 1.1 (or suse 9.3).

i do have Suse 9.3, and just a word of advice, quick with KDE, SLOW LIKE A DOG with Gnome. The OS itself is alright, but i can't use it, stupid RPM lack of support! I mean....portage and apt-get are this shiznit!

So try VLOS or Ubuntu if anything.

BTW...sucks that VLOS 1.2 got delayed from June 20 till Aug 1

I'd be interested too. But i'm a Linux N00b so i'm not sure what distro to get or how to properly get it set up. If some ones does it please post.

I have to agree that rpm/suse is not as robust/foolproof as portage for dealing with dependencies (especially automagically).

Well, New to these forums but....

SuSE 9.3 i386 version installs ... but there are problems:
USB comes up unusable ... tweek and poke at the USB modules to get it working
Wireless (aka BroadCom card) ... needs the ndiswrapper to work
BlueTooth ... (good question... haven't tested yest)
Firewire ... (good question... haven't tested yest)
PCMCIA ... (good question... haven't tested yest)
MediaCard Reader ... (good question... haven't tested yest)

SuSE 9.3 x86_64 version installs ... but fails to boot:
I''ve tried turning off apm and acpi to no avail...
During boot the system gets hung up scanning the PCI bus ... but just prior to the scan the message "Broken BIOS!" is displayed...



Interesting ... that the Wireless card is accessible from the bottom panel... It's a board in a mini PCI slot 3b (* if my measurements are correct *)... It may be possible to upgrade the wireless card to a better supported card ...
Will investegate further...

Anyone else have any install experiences with their Ferrari 4000 ?

Lissimore

Hi all,

I want to buy a Acer Ferrari 4000 and use Gentoo Linux on it (I'm a Gentoo user for three years now). I want to know some information about the notebook. I already searched for those information but haven't found them anywhere, so if any of you could post the output of the script below I'd be very gratiful. Well, smartctl and hdparm -t will only work properly if you're logged as root, if you don't trust my script you can run it as a normal user :-)

#!/bin/sh

export PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin"

echo -e "*****\nlspci"
lspci
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\nlspci -n"
lspci -n
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ncat /proc/cpuinfo"
cat /proc/cpuinfo
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ncat /proc/interrupts"
cat /proc/interrupts
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ncat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling"
cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ncat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature"
cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ncat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points"
cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ndmesg | grep hda"
dmesg | grep hda
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\nhdparm -t /dev/hda"
hdparm -t /dev/hda
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\nhdparm -i /dev/hda"
hdparm -i /dev/hda
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\nsmartctl -a /dev/hda"
smartctl -a /dev/hda
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\ndmesg | grep hdc"
dmesg | grep hdc
echo -e "*****\n"

echo -e "*****\nhdparm -i /dev/hdc"
hdparm -i /dev/hdc
echo -e "*****\n"

lamarque,
Aonde você está pensando em comprar seu Ferrari? No Brasil acredito que ainda vai demorar uns 60 dias para chegar ou mais, sem falar no preço.
Estou vendo para trazer dos EUA.
Grato,
Guilherme

I plan to put Vidalinux (gentoo) on mine, so I will let you know as soon as possible.

Guilherme,

Eu vou pedir para o cara q me vendeu meu notebook atual (um HP nx9010) para me trazer um. Ele trouxe meu nx9010 de Miami então não vou precisar esperar q eles chegem no Brasil. Comprar dele foi mais barato q comprar em loja naquela época, paguei em três vezes e ele ainda veio com nota fiscal. Antes de comprá-lo gostaria de saber mais detalhes técnicos sobre o notebook, por isso pedi pra executarem os comandos do outro "post".

------

I'm going to ask the same person who sold me my actual notebook (a HP nx9010) to bring me one. He brought my nx9010 from Miami, so I won't need to wait the Ferrari got here in Brasil. At that time buying from him was cheaper than buying from a notebook store, I paid in three instalments and it also came in with "nota fiscal". Before buying a Ferrari I would like to know more thecnical details about it, that's why I asked to execute the commands in my last post.

I forgot to ask to any of you guys to verify if the easy-launch buttons send X events. You can test them using xev command and clicking on each button, if xev print some text when clicking on a button then that button can be used in Xorg. All five easy-launch buttons of my nx9010 work and would be really good if I could keep using the easy-launch buttons to launch Konqueror e Kmail :-)

Well, Progress on the SuSE 9.3 x86-64 front

SuSE 9.3 x86_64 version installs ... boots
Well I've got most of the system up and running now with the exception of the dam ATI graphics driver. My god does their install process suck!
Anyone have an easy fail safe install procedure for ATI's crappy driver ?

I've ordered a replacement wireless Mini PCI card that is Intel based ... and fully supported by Kismet and other wireless tools.


Again; anyone else have any install experiences with their Ferrari 4000 ?

Lissimore

I just tried VLOS 1.1 for amd64 and it croaked horribly. The gui install dies when it tries to start x for the first time, and the text dies when I go to start installing the packages. It got to 11% of / had been formatted and then it stalled. I will try suse 9.3 and ubuntu 5.04 later.

Looking for an xorg.conf file for the Ferrari 4000 ...
I've got the XServer .. working ...(I hear the KDE booting ... initial desktop sounds) ... but the screen is blank ... I'm certain that I've messed up the display modelines ...

anybody with a working ATI driver care to share ?

Lamarque, pls check private message I sent you.
Guilherme

Keep up the good work guys, would be nice to have a dual boot 64bit machine

I tried ubuntu 5.04 but it would not install and it messed up something in the mbr b/c windows would not boot. I tried suse 9.3 without acpi and it installed but hung on boot like Lissimore said. What did you do to fix that? I am guessing apic=off or something similar given the broken bios quote. At least it installed grub so that I can boot windows again.

Yup... I initially turned acpi off ... got it up ... did a Yast kernel update ... and was able to apci back on ... mind you I've still got ACPI error messages appearing in syslog ...

I'll get to looking at those ACPI error messages once I get the ATI driver installed properly. I've almost got the driver installed and working well....
just need to tweak the xorg.conf file ....