Installing Ubuntu 5.10 AMD64 on Acer Aspire 5021 WLMi

Work in progress! Last updated: March 10^st, 2006

Introduction

I just got the new Acer Aspire 5021 WLMi from a local dealer in Barcelona/Spain for 999 Euros. Compared to other attractive Laptops from Acer with a similar price (like the Acer Aspire 1692 WLMi) the killer argument is the AMD Turion 64 Bit processor which should rock with Linux.

The laptop comes with Windows XP preinstalled so if you decide not to run Windows on your laptop there is a certain possibility to get back your money from the laptop-seller.

On my old laptop (Pentium3 500 MHz) I used Mandrake and Debian. Because of comments from friends I wanted to try out Ubuntu on my new machine.

Because of the lack of 64 bits versions some plugins as Flash and Java and programs as Skype have to been installed in 32 bits environment.

A lot of additional informations can be found in the Ubuntu amd64 forum.

What is actually working

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Mobile AMD Turion 64 Processor ML28	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
15.4 WXGA+ CrystalBrite TFT LCD	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
ATI Mobility Radeon X600 PCI Express / 64MB VRAM	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
512MB, DDR RAM, 2DIMMs	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
60 GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
Integrated Network Card Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5788 Gigabit Ethernet	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
Internal Wireless Networking from Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 802.11 b/g	Should work	Configured using ndiswrapper
Internal 56k Modem	Should work	"Sort of" supported.
DVD/CD-RW Slot Burner	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
Lithium-Ion Battery	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
Audio	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
Touchpad	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
IEEE 1494 Firewire	No idea	Not figured out yet.
Infrared	No idea	Not figured out yet.
S-video/TV-out (NTSC/PAL)	No idea	Not figured out yet.
4*USB 2.0	Works	No special procedure required during installation.
6 in 1 Cardreader (SM/MS/MS-Pro/MMC/SD/xD-Picture card)	Doesn't work	No Linux support yet.
Type II PC-Card	No idea	Not figured out yet
Various Buttons	Works	No special procedure required during installation.

Booting with LiveCDs

To get in touch with the new machine I just put in a Knoppix 3.8.1 LiveCD and booted. It booted perfectly, recognized the ATI graphics card but freezed (keyboard and touchpad weren´t recognized as I saw later) after starting the X-server and KDE. With a USB mouse plugged I got Knoppix running but without keyboard. Every few seconds appeared the message "APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)" and sometime hda: lost interrupt. This problem disappeared when booting the system with "knoppix noapic, nolapic".

Also the Ubuntu 5.04 AMD64 LiveCD freezed when the language selection menu show up. But different to Knoppix this distros also hang up with a USB mouse plugged.

First try with Debian Sarge AMD64

To get a basic knowledge of the system first read The Debian GNU/Linux AMD64 HOW-TO also it is yet a little bit outdated.

Basic installation of Debian Sarge AMD64 worked without problems and the laptop is operating under kernel version 2.6.8-11-amd64-generic. The network card was recognized and so I selected packages with aptitude and installed basic packages, X-server and gnome windowmanager. On finishing installation X server broke with message "cannot start X-Server". So I took the saved XF86Config-4 file from Knoppix which recognized the monitor CM01505 and horizontal frequency of 28.0-96.0 kHz and vertical frequency of 50.0-75.0 Hz. I only modified the part of mouse configuration putting mouse device to /dev/psaux.

Some specific hardware tasks:

Synaptics TouchPad: Synaptics touchpad didn´t work initially so I installed Synaptics TouchPad driver for XOrg/XFree86.

X11 with ATI Mobility Radeon: First used Knoppix configuration with generic vesa driver on resolution 1024x768. Later installed binary ATI driver package called fglrx which supports 1280*800 resolution.

Wireless Network Interface: Should work with ndiswrapper but fails on loading Windows 64 bit driver with message "failed to load".

Installing Ubuntu

Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" came out a few days ago so I just went the easy way installing this distribution famous for it's good hardware detection specially on laptops.

As you can see in the table above Ubuntu recognizes and configures a lot of the hardware automatically (all devices marked with "No special procedure required during installation."). So I'm only going to explain devices which needed a special configuration:

Wireless Network Interface

The laptop has a wireless chipset from Broadcom Corporation called BCM4318 802.11 b/g. I installed the ndiswrapper-source package and following the instructions from the ndiswrapper wiki I loaded the Windows 64 bit driver with the command:

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

This copies all necessary files to /etc/ndiswrapper and creates the config files for your card. After installing you can run:

ndiswrapper -l

to see the status of your installed drivers. If you have installed the correct driver you should see something like this:

Installed ndis drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present

Then we load the ndiswrapper module with:

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

and have a look if the kernel sees the wlan nic:

dmesg | tail -n 6

which gives you a description of your wireless lan interface:

[20457.536492] ndiswrapper version 1.1 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
[20457.541643] ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5 (Broadcom,02/11/2005, 3.100.64.0) loaded
[20457.541803] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:05.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
[20457.546419] ndiswrapper: using irq 21
[20457.800500] wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:0e:9b:c0:d3:cb using driver bcmwl5, configuration file 14E4:4318.5.conf
[20457.800522] wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP

Now we configure the interface with:

iwconfig

which shows me that the interface is available:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:off/any
 Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
 Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
 Power Management:off
 Link Quality:100/100 Signal level:-10 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Now we can scan the wlan access point:

iwlist wlan0 scan

and use the following command to get network access:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo dhclient wlan0

Actually the last to steps failed, I had to configure the acer_acpi module to enable the wireless card. You need Linux headers and gcc-3.4 installed in order to compile correctly. I installed the acer_acpi module with:

make
sudo make install

To activate it type:

modprobe acer_acpi

To make it accessible to all users on your computer:

sudo chmod 777 /proc/acpi/acer/wireless

And as last step turn on the wireless interface with:

echo "enabled: 1" >/proc/acpi/acer/wireless

Check with dmesg, if you see something like acer_acpi: Wireless value 1 then everything is all right. Now we can scan the wlan access point:

iwlist wlan0 scan

and use the following command to get network access:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo dhclient wlan0

For more detailed information - for example to put this steps into your init scripts so the wireless connection is automatically turned on - check out this tutorial in the Ubuntu Wiki about Configuring the ACER 5021WLMi / Aspire 5020 wireless Broadcom card in Ubuntu 64 bits.

6-in-1 card reader

Thanks to Carlos Corbacho for the following hint: "No Linux support yet (it uses a Texas Instruments 7421 FlashMedia Controller), although work has started on trying to create a driver (it doesn't do anything useful yet): http://www.webcon.ca/~imorgan/tifm21/"

SB400 Internal Modem

Thanks to Carlos Corbacho for the following hint: "It's "sort of" supported - Alsa supports it (snd-atiixp-modem), but you either need to patch it, or use the latest Release Candidates so that the driver knows this is a valid card. There's also some extra software needed, 'slmodemd' - I "sort of" got this working, but haven't really bothered to go very far since I have no need of it."

some debug output

Here is what lspci reveals:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5950 (rev 01)
0000:00:02.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a34
0000:00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4374
0000:00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4375
0000:00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4373
0000:00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4372 (rev 11)
0000:00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4376
0000:00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4377
0000:00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4371
0000:00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4370 (rev 02)
0000:00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4378 (rev 02)
0000:00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 3150
0000:06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation: Unknown device 4318 (rev 02)
0000:06:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8031
0000:06:06.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8032
0000:06:06.3 Unknown mass storage controller: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8033
0000:06:06.4 0805: Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8034
0000:06:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)

Detailed output with lspci -v can be found here.

Installing 32 bits versions of applications which don't exist for AMD64

Because of the lack of 64 bits versions some applications have to be installed with the linux32 execution command. There are a lot of tutorials out there so I just point you to the appropriate pages for some important plugins and programs:

Flash & Java Plugins

Blackdown offers a 64 bits version of the Java Plugin which you can install following the tutorial Firefox plugin for amd64. As this worked quite instable for me I prefer the following method:

They most comfortable way to use Flash and Java in a website is to install Firefox 1.5 32 bits version using linux32 execution command. The disadvantage of this method is that you can't use the original Firefox 64bits version and this new installation at the same time, but it doesn't matter because you won't use the default navigator anymore. Following the steps described in the tutorial Firefox 1.5, Flash and Java in amd64 Ubuntu Breezy installations worked perfect for me.

Skype

There is no 64 bits version of Skype but you can use the 32 bits version easily following this Easy Way to run Skype under amd64. But do this only if you don't use any KDE application (kmail, k3b, kate, etc.) on your system! This steps installs 32 bits libs of Qt and breaks all KDE apps!

Last updated: 14/08/2006
copyleft 2006: Gerald Kogler