Review of my Acer Travelmate 5720 and Linux

Model: Acer TravelMate 5720

Rating: Very good. Really, even if i chosed it trying to maximize linux support is was not expecting such a success.

Hardware:

• CPU: Intel Core Duo T7100, OK.
• RAM: 1Gb, OK.
• Hard drive: WDC WD1600BEVS-22RST0 (160Gb), OK but i’m getting “spurious completion during NCQ” kernel errors (NCQ is Native Command Queuing and should give better performance for concurrent accesses to the disk), so i had to blacklist my hard drive in the kernel in drivers/ata/libata.c, because the hard disk is probably not following the specification. This should not be a big problem anyway, and even before blacklisting it for NCQ i did not have any data loss in any way.
• Mouse/Keyboard/LCD: OK.
• Video Card: Intel 965G, OK (and opensource drivers!) but i’m still getting too many crashes while using 3D applications and OpenGL-2.0/FBO is not supported (yet). I recommend you to use latest drivers at http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ and remember to compile mesa with -fno-strict-aliasing (Very important!). That said, the performance is acceptable (Beryl runs perfectly), but not at the level of a good ATI/Nvidia.
• Sound Card: Intel HDA+Realtek ALC268, OK, just compile the development version of ALSA (http://www.alsa-project.org/) and it will rock.
• DVD Writer: HL-DT-ST GSA-T20N, OK, i had to add the PCI id of the IDE contoller to drivers/ata/ata_piix.c (and this made my first Linux installation somewhat difficult), but this addition is now mainstream.
• Ethernet: Tigon3, OK (including boot from network and WOL).
• Webcam: Suyin UVC compatible (very good quality), OK, you have to install the uvcvideo driver (http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/).
• Bluetooth: Broadcom USB Dongle, OK.
• Wireless: Intel 3945ABG, OK (and opensource drivers!) but it does not support master mode, WOWL and most important, the led is not working :). However these features are being worked out and the iwlwifi driver is quickly improving and it is being merged mainstream, see also http://intellinuxwireless.org/.
• PCMCIA: Texas Instruments PCIxx12, shoud be OK but not tested.
• Smart/MultimediaCard reader: Texas Instruments PCIxx12, shoud be OK but not tested. This device registers two PCI entries (only one of them can be active), one is using the SDHCI standard (the linux driver is called sdhci) and supports SD cards, and the other one a proprietary interface, but it supports SD/MMC/MS/xD type cards. An opensource driver for this interface is being developed but at the moment it supports all formats except xD, and the only card i could test it with is xD. See also TI FlashMedia xx12/xx21 driver Wiki, tifmxx project page and tifm21-devel list.
• ACPI extras: OK, install the driver at http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/.
• Internal Modem: Conexant HDA/HSF: NOT OK, i was able to make it work with the “demo” of the driver being sold by Linuxant assh*les at 14.4kps, but their proprietary driver forces you to use and old version of the ALSA sound drivers that will crash your system. Don’t give Linuxant 20$ for supporting of an out-of-date technology with a driver that does not work (and even worse crashes your machine), just buy an external modem if you need it. I fear that Acer just included this piece of sh*t only to piss me off, better if they did not include any modem at all.