Installing Debian Linux on an Acer AS1410
This document describes how I installed Debian GNU Linux onto an Acer AS1410 also known as Acer Timeline 1810. To perform all the steps yourself you will need to have another system already running Debian in order to compile kernel modules and setup the USB installation media. I have provided all the compiled versions of the drivers I created as well as referenced the materials needed in order to do all the steps yourself
If you want to find out how to upgrade the BIOS after you have installed Linux onto your AS1410 visit my BIOS Update page.
Building USB Bootable Install Media
Before getting started you need to create the installation media. As the AS1410 doesn't have a CDROM drive you will need to use a USB Stick or other USB Disk like device to do the installation. You could use a USB CD-ROM drive, however things seem to be easier by using a USB stick (1GB should be more than enough).
First obtain a copy of the boot.img.gz file. This is used to create a bootable image on the USB stick. You can get yours from your favorite debian mirror. The link above is for the main debian repository.
Now that you have the boot.img.gz file you want to copy it onto your USB stick. However since this is an image file you can't just copy it to the stick and hope it works. You need to do a raw copy. This is easiest done by running the following command as root:
# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdk
Depending on what your USB stick registers as on your system you will want to change the /dev/sdk to match that device.
Next you want to build a copy of the AR81 Family Linux driver so that you can get the built-in Ethernet controller working. To obtain the source for this package you can download it from here. Make sure to select the AR81Family Linux Driver.
Once you have the source you then need to compile it for the correct Linux kernel. The one that comes with the Lenny installer as I write this is the 2.6.26-2-486 kernel. You will need to get the linux-headers package for this kernel and then build the AR81 driver. If you are not currently running this kernel on your system then you will need to modify the Makefile in the archive to update the BUILD_KERNEL parameter to reflect the correct option. Here is what I had:
BUILD_KERNEL=2.6.26-2-486
If you are compiling for kernels newer than 2.6.28 then you may need to update some constants in the file. These are the updated values that you will need to have:
IRQ_HANDLED 1 IRQ_NONE 0
Once these steps are done building the actual driver is quite straight forward. From inside the src directory of the AR81 archive execute the make command. After this completes you should have an atl1e.ko file in the same directory.
You will then need to copy the atl1e.ko file onto the same USB stick. I created a separate directory to store the driver file so that it would be easy to find and access. Plus if I needed to add any additional drivers I could always add them to this directory.
The last step is to obtain a copy of the Debian Net-Installer image you wish to use to install your system from. I used the standard one here. Make sure that you know what kernel version the installer you choose is going to be using during the installation process. This has to match the version of the kernel you compiled the atl1e.ko driver for.
Once the driver and the Debian net-installer ISO have been copied. Unmount the USB Stick and stick it onto the AS1410 laptop.
To save the headach of building the drivers you can use the versions that I compiled from here. While I compiled them using the instructions above I still assume no liability for these drivers.
| Kernel Version | Driver |
|---|---|
| 2.6.26-2-486 | atl1e.ko |
| 2.6.26-2-686 | atl1e.ko |
| 2.6.30-2-686 | atl1e.ko |
Booting Installer
By default my AS1410 did not boot off of the USB stick. I had to go under the system settings when it first booted (pressing F2) and change the boot order. I moved the USB HD option up to the top so it would take precedence over all other options.
The USB stick should boot without any issues now. It should present the standard Debian installer boot screen. Go through the standard process of starting the installation process.
After you choose your language and keyboard layout you will need to install the atl1e driver. To do this you will need to drop into a console (alt-f2 should take you to one). From the prompt you will then want to navigate to the USB stick. This should be /hd-media/, but some navigating around the directory structure should find it easily. You then want to insmod the driver:
insmod atl1e.ko
Once done you should have a working eth0 device. You can now exit out of the terminal and go back to the installation screen.
If the installation process has already determined that you don't have a network card then you will have to have it try and detect one again. Otherwise you should be able to proceed with the standard install without any issues.
Installation
As mentioned above you should be able to do a standard debian install without any complications. Once the system reboots you will then need to install a newer than 2.6.26 kernel and recompile the atl1e driver for the correct kernel version.
First Boot
After the installation is complete the system should reboot nicely. Once you get a prompt you will notice that your network card is likely not working anymore. This is because it is very likely that the debian installer installed a different version of the kernel than the one you previously compiled the atl1e driver for.
You will need to follow the steps above to compile the driver for the current kernel version installed on the laptop. If you know ahead of time what version of the kernel is going to be installed during the installation you can have this already waiting on the USB stick. The version I was presented with was 2.6.26-2-686.
Finally to make sure that during future boots of the system that you don't have to manually install the kernel module you will want to copy it to the module tree of the current running kernel. My path was /lib/modules/2.6.16-2-686/kernel/drivers/net/atl1e/
Kernel Upgrade
After you get the eth0 device working again you will probably want to get the wireless card working. This requires a kernel that is newer than 2.6.28. To obtain this you will want to download and install this kernel from the appropriate debian package. As of this witting the lenny release has a 2.6.30 kernel available.
Before you restart your system to use this kernel you will likely want to build and install the atl1e driver compiled for this version. Otherwise you will have to do it afterwards on a different system.
Xorg
By default it looks that the version of Xorg that installs from lenny works just fine. However, the issue is that it is using the VESA driver instead of a properly built driver. Looking around for information on this I found that the xorg-xserver-video-intel driver greater than version 2.7.0 has native support.
The problem with getting this version of the xorg video driver is that it is currently only in the testing branch. The choices are now limited to installing from testing, compiling my own backported packages or stay using the VESA mode driver.
I opted to installing the packages form testing using pinning. This made things simple as I only had to add a source into my sources list and then add the appropriate pinning lines and apt-get install the packages I needed using the -t option to specify testing.
Once completed I had a properly functioning X server that also responded to the ACPI sleep and wake events correctly.
Finished System
| Working | Not-Working | Haven't Worked On |
|---|---|---|
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|
|
Sleeping
While I had things working very well Debian Lenny, I decided to upgrade to Unstable to take advantage of the accellerated graphics drivers. Doing so seems to have caused problems with sleeping. The symptoms are that when I close the lid and the system goes into sleep mode (suspend to RAM) and then I wake the system up my display becomes all wonky. Running xrandr to set the display to the default mode fixes the display issue. If I run the sleep command manually with the list still open, things work perfectly fine. If any one has any ideas as to what is going on please let me know by filling out my Contact Form.
Pain
As with most installs on fairly new hardware there is a degree of pain involved. This was no exception. Initially I used a live boot image to test that linux would boot and that I would have all of the drivers I needed to use the various components. Most important of which were the network cards (wifi and wired).
After doing research before purchasing this laptop I determined that all the hardware that came with it was supported. However upon booting with the live boot CD I found that neither the NIC nor the WIFI card were actually detected. This was cause for concern, but I had 14 days to return the laptop, so I went and started doing some more work.
The first thing I did was scrap the live boot image and went on to download a Debian net installer image. The idea here is that hopefully the net installer will have slightly newer kernel and slightly better driver support.
Netinstall from A USB Stick?
Of course the first problem here is to get a bootable copy of Debian on a USB stick. This proved harder than originally anticipated. After going through several attempts I finally found the method of doing this. Using the Debian documentation I was able to get the boot.img.gz image and a copy of the net installer iso image. all placed on a USB stick.
I have 0 Network Interfaces?
Booting a working distro was one thing.. being able to install was something different. Now that I had a working boot image I found that I had no network devices. So more research was required to get a working network interface.
After reading around I found that the network card that was reporting as:
Attansic Technology Corp. Device 1063 (rev c0)
was really just an Atheros card. So I had to custom compile a driver that would work with the debian installers 2.6.26-2 kernel. Then once I booted from the installer USB I would insmod the module and I would have the wired NIC setup.
The wireless module was a little more complicated. Since I didn't want to void the warranty and not be able to return the laptop should this not work I had to find a way to boot a newer kernel (2.6.27 or later) to make sure that the built-in Intel WiFi Link 5100 was actually going to work correctly for me. I finally found a copy of slax which did the trick and made me confident in actually installing debian.
Installing Debian
With my bootable USB stick in hand with the added atl1e.ko module copied to it, I was ready to install debian. The big issue here was to get the atl1e driver installed into the modules directory before the network probe was run. This involved copying a compiled copy of the .ko driver onto the USB stick I was installing Debian from and then after choosing the language preferences for the debian installer dropping into a shell and copying the driver from off of the USB stick and into the kernel modules directory tree structure in the correct location. Once done the installer booted up and found my network card perfectly.
The remainder of the Debian installation was very straight forward as I have done countless Debian installs, and every release the people responsible for Debian have made the installer easier and better each time. So I won't bore you with the details of my setup and configuration, suffice it to say that it went smoothly.
Post Installation
Once the base system was installed I then rebooted the system only to find that yet again I was without a working network card. Not really a problem as I was expecting this. I had to recompile another version of the atl1e driver to work with the kernel version that was installed during the Debian installation. Once done the wired network worked just fine. That completed I then upgraded to the 2.6.30 kernel now available from the Debian repositories. Upgrading to this release had the desired effect of getting my wireless card working correctly. A quick recompile again of the atl1e driver and my wired network card works as well.
The rest of the components I needed to install were then pulled from the appropriate Debian repositories. Everything seemed to be working just fine. That is until I tried to get the system to sleep. And then another dreaded problem occurred. The system slept just fine, but when I tried to wake it up the screen stayed black, no back-light, no anything. Trying to use the keys to turn the monitor on and off, switch to an external monitor, etc, had no effect.
Getting the System to Sleep
The next task was to try and get the system to sleep. In researching this I also found out that the driver being used for X was the VESA driver. I also found out that in order to get better graphics performance I would need to install a newer version of the intel xorg video driver.
Simple enough. I added the testing repository to my apt sources and pulled the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver. This also installed a whole ton of other packages from testing. I was hoping that this wasn't going to cause problems with my system.
After the installation completed the upside was that I could now sleep the system and resume without any problems. Also the ability to dim the screen now worked properly. I could also adjust the volume with the volume keys correctly. The downside was that I couldn't use my arrow keys. Something was getting the key-mappings all messed up.
Solve One Problem, Create One More
So now that I couldn't use my arrow keys I had to find out why. The keys worked just fine when I wasn't in X, so something that was running in my xsession was causing problems. Some searching and trial and error found that it was the gnome-setting-daemon that was causing issues.
I found out where this was running from and then disabled it from starting up. Restarted X, and boom, my keyboard worked perfectly now. The only trouble here is that everything looked awful. None of my windows were using the correct fonts and styles. Things were just ugly all over. Looks like gnome-settings-daemon was doing lots of good stuff. Doing some searching around I found several other applications that allowed for similar behavior.
Happy Camper
All completed. I am now quite happy with the workings of the laptop. I'm pretty sure that the gnome-settings-daemon problem is a bug that is being worked through. That's what I get for running apps that are still in testing. As I have now found workarounds for using gnome-settings-daemon I don't have to worry about this anymore.
Windows Refund
After I finished installing Debian onto my laptop and got settled using it I heard that apparently I could get a refund on my Windows Vista license that came with it. I did the leg work to find out what would be involved by then decided against proceeding due to the length of time I would be without the laptop and the fact that I would have to re-install everything from scratch again.
Basically the procedure is, call up Acer and ask for a Windows refund. You will likely have to talk to a higher level customer support person to actually get somewhere on this. Once you have spoken with someone about this you will then be instructed that you have to ship the laptop to them at your own expense as if it was a repair. Once they receive the laptop it will be 7-10 business days before they return it to you. During that time they remove all Windows IP from the system and wipe the drive completely clean (write all zero's to the disk). They then ship it back to you at their expense. Later you will receive a cheque in the mail for around $60.
To me the $60 was not worth the amount of time I would be without the laptop at this point. Plus the pain of going through the re-install and setup of the system was a bit much. The principal of the thing can only take me so far.
For those wanting to get a refund, keep in mind that you must not have booted into windows. Or if you did you must have declined the terms on the windows license.