[wellylug] Linux compatibility question: ACER Aspire 1355

[Grant McLean]

On Sat, 2004-06-05 at 20:12, Pizbit wrote:
> A friend of mine is looking at getting a laptop fairly soon and has picked out 
> the ACER Aspire 1355 from DSE (Cat No. XC5522) as his choice. He has expressed a 
> wish to have it dual boot windows/linux. He's a windows man but he wants linux 
> to try out mostly because he likes some of the screenshots of my desktop I've 
> shown him, but I digress.
> Anyone able to comment on how difficult it'd be to install linux on it?

Well, I'm sending this reply using Evolution on Debian Sarge running on
an Acer Aspire 1350, so I can say that it works for me (albeit '5' less
in my model number).

As Lyndsay suggested, I found running Knoppix off CD to be instructive
and it gave me the confidence that it would all go.  I then downloaded
the ISO image for the Sarge installer and burnt it on the machine.  

I also dual boot XP and was a bit nervous about repartitioning the drive
since I don't have a copy of partition magic.  As it turned out, it was
no problem at all since the factory XP installation was on a FAT32
partition and 'parted' (the partition editor) is part of the Debian
installer process and it was able t0 resize things on the fly.

Initially I ran with the standard 2.4 kernel with the framebuffer
enabled (via a kernel option in the Grub setup) and XFree86 seemed to go
OK.  Unfortunately neither USB nor sound worked 'out of the box'.  I
then upgraded to a 2.6 kernel (just a case of installing the right
package on Debian) and USB and sound started working.  At the moment,
I'm just using the unaccelerated Vesa driver for X but there's an
interesting looking project underway to support the 'Unichrome' chipset
natively.

I'd be happy to supply copies of config files if you need to compare
things to a working version.

Cheers
Grant