RedHat 7.3 GNU/Linux on an Acer Aspire 1400 LC

1) Installation:

The notebook has a 20 GB disk with preinstalled WinXP Home, the whole disk is formatted as FAT32. For using it as a dual boot system I used Partition Magic 5:

• Shrinking the first partition to 5200 MB
• Adding a Linux partition of 64 MB for /boot
• Adding a Swap partition of 512 MB (which might not be sufficient when using 768 MB RAM and 2.4 kernel)
• Adding 5200 MB Linux partition for /
• Adding 8100 MB FAT32 partition for sharing files between WinXP and Linux

2) Problems:

• The main problem after installation were frequent system freezes, which made the system more or less useless. The system freezes totally, i.e. also access via ssh etc. is not possible. It is probably relatated to the X-Server. I tried different configurations by help of "Xconfigurator" and "xf86cfg" without success.  I copied XF86config and XF86config-4 from an other notebook which has the horizontal refresh set rate to 40.4 kHz instead of a range and that seems to solve the problem. The vertical rate is 60 Hz. No freezes since then.
  A few weeks later I'm not sure if this is the real explanation: I had no more systems freezes, but on an identical Aspire I had'nt any freezes at all although I modified the refresh rates to the ranges which seem to stop the other notebook.
• Switching to text mode (Ctrl-Alt-F1) works but switching back (Ctrl-Alt-F7) to X11 freezes the display. But the system keeps running so you can login remotely and reboot.
• The display sometimes flickers after those problems. Restarting the X-Server (Ctrl-Backspace) helps.

3) Others:

• Internal modem: I have downloaded slmdm-2.6.16_i386.tar from SmartLink. Built and installed the rpm-packages easily as described. Works fine. This is a good example for Linux support !
• The sound system (detected by sndconfig) works but it is very hushed. gmix from package gnome-media presents some buttons which help to have a satisfying loudness, at least for the speakers quality ;-)
• X-CD-Roast works fine.
• Tried an USB Memory stick with 128 MB  (mkdir /stick; mount /dev/sda1 /stick). Seems to work fine.
• Installed Intel Fortran Compiler
  
• Installed the NetCDF-Library. Works fine on the ext3-Partition, but fails to write to the FAT32-Partition. This is probably not notebook specific and might be avoided by compiling the library on the FAT32. I will try tomorrow ;-)

4) What I haven't tried (until now):

• Configure power management
• Trying to send or receive fax messages via internal modem
• Playing Video-DVDs
• Using the TV set connection
• Using PCMCIA Cards (i.e. WLAN)

5) SuSE:

6) Remarks:

• The notebook comes with 256 MB RAM installed. I bought 512 MB RAM and installed it in the "user-upgradeable" slot. It was easy, although  the plastic tabs holding the module are softish and the module sliped out again twice after some time. Now it seems to hold. Unfortunately, the upgrade to 1 GB RAM means to throw away the first 256 MB, because the notebook is delivered with 256 MB only.
• The three initial battery loading cycles (conditioning) took about 3 hours for loading (power off) and 100 minutes for using memtest86-2.8
  

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