Installation report for Acer TravelMate 8100

[Andreas Koch]

> 

> So downgrading your BIOS fixed the video?

> 



The latest ATI driver 8.13.3, though advertised as being suitable only
for the Xpress 200 chipset, does work with the current ATI BIOS 3C22
without the horizontal flickering lines :-). It takes some hackery to
get the fglrx module to compile for kernel 2.6.12-rc5, though.
Specifically, the dev->slot_name accesses have to be replaced by the
pci_name(dev), and the now deprecated inter_module_get() calls be
re-enabled by removing the `static' qualifier from the function in the
kernel sources (and EXPORTing its symbol). A cleaner solution for the
second glitch would be to replace the call by symbol_get, but I didn't
have time to look into that. 



3D acceleration on the internal display is now available using DRI.
Caveat: I have tested this successfully only up to Xorg X11 6.8.99.5.
In 6.8.99.8, the ATI DRI no longer works, since it expects version
4.1.0 and the Xorg X11 has then updated to 5.0.0. DVI is still not
functional. I really wonder at the cluelessness of ATI in regard to
this matter: Even the free X.org radeon driver can handle the DVI
output, but the ATI drivers have consistently failed for the last few
versions.

I have not tested the TV-out yet but suspect it will fail again due to
the invalid sig of the BIOS TV Info block.



Just as an aside, the ezDock doesn't really work under Linux. None of
the new peripherals (USB, Firewire etc.) is recognized correctly. This
might point to something being wrong in the PCI-Express handling in the
kernel (most of the connectors attach via PCI-Express to the notebook),
but again, I'll have to investigate further. Even more frustrating is,
that the ezDock worked out of the box under WinXP, with exception of
the analog modem all peripherals were recognized without installing
additional drivers.



Also, there's now a fixed DSDT for the 3C22 BIOS available on
sourceforge, but I haven't tried that yet either.









:)


-- 
Andreas Koch