Installation report for Acer TravelMate 8100

[Gary Coady]

mikewimmer wrote:
> - The DVD drive worked out of the box with Hoary's kernel (although
> without DMA, it seemed), but all the kernels that I compiled myself don't
> recognize it.

You should enable ATAPI support in libata for the DVD drive to be seen.
You can get it with git/cogito at
rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jgarzik/libata-dev#atapi-enable

But - eh - that's a lot of work when you can just edit
include/linux/libata.h. In this file, search for
#undef ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI
and replace it with
#define ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI

I haven't actually tested DVD burning (due to laziness getting down to a
local shop to buy some blanks), but it's detected properly anyway.

In general, SATA is a work in progress at the moment, and the more
recent the kernel, the better. I'm currently hoping for ATAPI to be
enabled by default for the 2.6.13 kernel (it won't get into 2.6.12 now)
- so that makes me wonder which kernel is planned for breezy...

> (BTW for those interested: I applied the 3c22 DSDT patches from
> acpi.sourceforge.net and ACPI seems to work fine: Battery, cpu
> frequency scaling)

Does this DSDT patch fix the "jumping lines" problem with X, as I've
seen it described? I currently use my own DSDT patch, and I've had to
stay with 3c17 for the moment because of this problem.

> - Has anybody got PCMCIA working? When I start cardmgr, the system
> hangs and has to be rebooted. dmesg sais about PCMCIA:

...

> so this looks fine. Previous kernels gave me a kernel oops for
> yenta_socket, but

Not crashing counts as progress :-) I don't have any Cardbus cards to
test, though...

Gary.