Linux Compatibility: Acer Aspire 1353XC

[phoronix]

This is an entry for Phoronix LCH. Feel free to comment on the Linux compatibility for the Acer Aspire 1353XC in this thread.

Acer Aspire 1353XC



Description: Acer laptop with 14.1" TFT XGA screen, AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ CPU (1.8GHz Max), 20GB HDD, S3 GFX KN400/KM400, QSI CDRW/DVDROM DRIVE, PCMCIA, NETWORK,MODEM, S-VIDEO OUT, 1 Parralell port, 4 USB ports, VGA OUT, Firewire, Realtek AC 97 Audio, Infrared.
Hardware Notes: This information applies to the whole Aspire 1350 range of laptop computers made by Acer CPU scalable between 800MHz and 1791MHz Brightness keys and sleep keys are hardware supported...as are backlight control and display control. Other function keys require OS to support them.

IRDA
IRDA works well if setup correctly the serial port must be disabled using:

setserial uart none none /dev/ttyS1

nsc-ircc support in the kernel is required for IRDA as this laptop uses a National Semiconductors Chip for infrared.

DMA 1, IRQ 3, IO 0x2f8

FIR is the only mode i have tried wtih the nsc-ircc driver... talking to my nokia-3650 mobile phone. Information on how to do this is available on the web, look into linux 3650 and the openobex protocol. Tuxmobil has a lot of helpful info. Acer Travelmate's use a similar infrared chip.

CPU
AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ 1.8GHz (Barton 72W)
512KB L2 Cache
Scalable between 800 and 1791MHz using amd k7 cpufreq driver in the kernel (2.6 kernel required)
Scaling is supported well by SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu out of the box.

CPU may have issues with kernels between 2.6.9 and 2.6.12 and scaling

CPU is classed as an i686..

AMD powernow is the feature that deals with scaling... various modes are available with the cpufreq driver in the kernel..major distros have nice interfaces to cpufreq.

Modem 56K
Modem is detected and works in Fedora and SuSE.

Should also work in Ubuntu.

Synaptics Touchpad
Works best with 2.6 kernel.. latest kernels may give better features.. Xorg should be properly configured to use the full 6 buttons on the touchpad...

My ubuntu xorg.conf contains:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection

To support this.

The synaptics touch pad driver can also be found at:
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

If your distro does not include it.