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Acer TravelMate 4001WLMi

Johan Vromans
Articles » TM4001WLMi » Fedora Core 6


I'm not going in too much details, but I decided to upgrade to (not install from scratch) Fedora Core 6. However, some time ago I found it necessary to resize some of the partitions and it was a hard and tedious job, so I decided to change the disk partitioning to logical volumes. It was a fun exercise, and worked out perfectly.

Basically, I scratched the 30Gb spare partition I had on the disk, and turned it into a physical volume (see the documentation of the Logical (Linux?) Volume Manager for details). I assigned it a volume group, and created a logical volume on wich I copied the existing Fedora Core 5 root. Then I booted the Fedora Core 6 DVD -- which refused to boot. Probably a rotten DVD? Fortunately I recently found out that I could boot the notebook from a USB stick, so I created a boot stick and booted from it. With “linux askmethod”, of course. I pointed the installer to the new, logical volume root, and proceeded the upgrade. Then I installed all accumulated Fedora Core 6 updates, bringing the kernel to version 2.6.20.

Later I did some more reshuffeling with the data on the partitions, and added the hard partitions to the volume group making one big volume. There I created several new logical volumes to end up with the final configuration:

PartStartEndSizeTypeUse
hda1112169767488+cW95 FAT32 
hda21217125430523583Linux/boot
hda31255716947512237+5Extended 
hda4717072961020127+82Linux swapSwap
hda51255272611823808+8eLVM2VolGroup00
hda627723583688382183LVM2VolGroup00
hda73584716928804513+83LVM2VolGroup00

Logical volumes:

VolumeSizeUse
VolGroup00-FC6Root12G/
VolGroup00-Home7G/home
VolGroup00-Opt1G/opt
VolGroup00-Local4G/usr/local
VolGroup00-OldFC5Root6G/mnt/fc5 (for reference)

A little investigation learned that the following components were not functioning optionally, if at all:

  • Controlling the fans (doesn't work);
  • Many of the "special keys";
  • Suspend to RAM;

Major differences with the status after installing Fedora Core 5:

  • Reading battery and AC adapter status works;
  • Controlling the CPU speed works;
  • Wireless drivers are part of the kernel. The firmware needs to be fetched externally due to licensing issues;
  • Suspend to Disk works. I also experimented with Software Suspend 2, which also works.

Kernel patches required: DSDT from initrd.
Optional kernel patches: Software Suspend 2.

The rest of this section describes the tricks and hacks needed to get most of these functional again.

Section "Acer keys" attacks the special Acer keys.

Section "ACPI hacking" attacks the harder issues of DSDT errors, and better battery status read out.



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articles/TM4001WLMi/fedora6/index.html last modified 13:10:24 01-May-2007