Installation of Linux on an ACER Aspire 2001WLMi

The ACER Aspire 2001WLMi comes with the Intel 855PM chipset, an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card and a 15.4" WXGA TFT wide screen display. The Windows default screen resolution is 1280x800.

The disk came with four partitions. A large FAT32 (C: Windows XP Home Edition) partition, a second primary partition (user disk D: also FAT32), a third hided primary partition for which I could not figure out a purpose and a 94.1MB ext2 filesystem partition which contains a tiny Linux kernel for booting up the standalone ARCADE player. This player will be fired up as soon as the "ARCADE" button on the front of the notebook is pressed. If that button is pressed when WinXP is booted a Windows based player is run.

After repartitioning the disk I was not able to find out where the tiny ext2 partition has to be placed in order to keep the ARCADE button functionality. I always got "Missing Operating System".

Re-partitioning the hard disk

Here are the steps that helped in my case. I used Paragon Partition Manager to change partitioning scheme:

delete third (hided) partition
delete second (user FAT32) partition
delete ext2 (ARCADE player) partition
resize the first FAT32 partition to an appropriate size
create 2nd primary partition for the LINUX root system (mount point "/")
create extended partition (rest of the disk, except for about 94.1MB)
create at least three logical volumes in the extended partition (in my case an ext3 partition for /home, a Linux swap partition and a FAT32 partition (D:))
leave the space behind the extended partition empty
take the disk labeled "Aspire 2000 Series : Instant-on Arcade CD" and reconstruct the standalone ARCADE player partition

After the initial setup, my ARCADE button did not work anymore. I got "Missing Operating System". However, since I needed grub anyway I found a way to boot up the ARCADE image from grub (read below).
At this time I contacted the German ACER support because I could not find out what requirements for the ARCADE partition were needed. I assumed it has to be a primary partition but it seemed not to make any difference whether it was the third or last primary partition (at least I thought so, but later realized that even if it was the physical 2nd primary partition it got assigned the 4th id label!! (/dev/hda on Linux). And the ARCADE button worked as long as there was no other ext2 or ext3 filesystem partition on the disk. The German support denied any Linux related support and refused to forward my inquiry about the requirements for the ARCADE partition to Taiwan (since nobody on the German site had a clue about Linux) even when I formulated my request in English (Cut&Paste seems to be too laboursome). So I promised to post my bad experience with them on an appropriate web page :-). For me that's quite annoying: Using Linux and OpenSource projects' results but not supporting the community in any way (my support request was not related to Linux installation issues but only about how to repartition a hard disk while not loosing the ARCADE button functionality).

Partial Solution:

make sure the ARCADE ext2 partition is a primary partition
make sure it has the ID "4" (means in Linux terms it has to be /dev/hda4 !!!)
reconstruct the ARCADE partition by the recovery disk (/dev/hda4 must either be empty or already contain the ARCADE system to have that one work ...)

Installation issues

I first tried Mandrake 9.2 but it freezed several times before I noticed that this comes from the touch panel. So I decided to connect a regular mouse but had to learn that only USB mice can be used with the Aspire 2000 series notebooks. However, Mandrake 9.2 had no trouble recognizing and using the USB mouse. So installation after that worked without further trouble. However, the screen resolution was quite bad since a standard resolution of 1024x768 was chosen and I could not find out what X Server to choose to get my ATI 9200 Radeon recognized. Also the Mandrake grub boot loader configuration wizard was unable to configure my ARCADE player image properly.
So this is the reason why decided to give the Fedora Core a try. There I used the USB mouse since I now knew that the touchpad would give me some trouble. The Fedora Core even configured the grub boot loader for the ARCADE partition correctly and now I have a boot menu which contains a boot entry for the ARCADE player.
However, both, Mandrake and Fedora Core ended up with a standard 1024x768 screen resolution that is quite bad for the WXGA display (1280x800). So XFree configuration followed.

The entry in the grub.conf file for the standalone ARCADE player (this is /boot/grub/grub.conf in my case, other distributions might know the file as /etc/grub.conf):

title ARCADE

rootnoverify (hd0,3)

chainloader +1

Please note that the special ARCADE ext2 partition is the 4th primary partition (/dev/hda4). So this is why (hd0, 3) has to be taken.
I also tried to boot it up as Linux (kernel XXX, root=... entry). But this failed!

XFree86 Configuration

Download the ATI Radeon XFree86 4.3.0 drivers from:
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-3.7.0.i386.rpm
Since Mesa was installed with Fedora it is important to force the rpm package installation:
rpm -i --force fglrx-glc22-4.3.0-3.7.0.i386.rpm
Ignore the warnings printed when installing the rpm package.
Backup your /etc/XF86Config file before proceeding.
Run the ATI configuration utility to create a new /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file:
fglrxconfig
Try to answer all questions (do not worry, my XF86Config file is given below). fglrxconfig is not able to enable 1280x800 screen resolution directly so one has to edit the XF86Config-4 file anyway.
Link XF86Config-4 to XF86Config.
Edit the file and add the screen resolution 1280x800 as default screen resolution.

Here is my XF86Config file: /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
My webspace provider does not allow files without appropriate file extension. So, please make sure to remove the .txt ending before installing.

ACPI

To enable ACPI, add acpi=on to the kernel parameter list (see grub.conf or lilo.conf ...).
See http://www-lehre.inf.uos.de/~rfreund/acpi.php for information about how to save battery. Note: the wmthrottle does not work for me. Further investigating ...

More Issues

I have not yet tried out to get speedstep and the touchpad working but I will post the results ASAP.