Travelmate 3210 series consist of full-featured widescreen laptops weighting two and half kilogams. Although this information is written for 3212WXMi (sold in Finland), it should apply for all the TravelMate 321x machines as well.
Just insert the CD and boot. Nothing special here, except you have to pass the kernel a parameter noapic or the kernel will hang right on boot. Ubuntu's installation procedure recognizes all the hardware without problems. The only thing needing a bit tweaking is the X server: the LCD screen stays blank until you insert Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,NONE" in the Device section of your xorg.conf, assuming the open-source ati.o driver is used. Anyway, right now you should have a desktop in the front of you. Great! Finally, if you prefer a KDE desktop over Gnome & friends like I and mr. Torvalds do, just say apt-get install kubuntu-desktop.
I've been using Debian and Gentoo last few years, and actually I was surprised by the easyness of Ubuntu's installation process. Since Gentoo has fresh software and excellent support forum, I was originally going to install Gentoo on this machine, but gave up after few hours of compiling software – no, I don't want anymore to burn all the CPU just for 2% performance boost. Imagine all computers doing that - what a ecological catastroph. So, being familiar with Debian but bored to wait new software for it, Ubuntu was my choise. I recommend you to give it a try. However, I can't understand why there is no i686-packages available for Ubuntu.
Updated 5/2006. Upgraded to Dapper Drake (development branch). It includes NetworkManager, which makes life lots of easier: available networks - both wired and wireless - are autodetected and shown in nice little applet. Finally!
Summa summarum: Generally Acer Travelmate 3210 is pretty usable under Linux - with following exceptions: you can't use built-in card reader and the functionality of ATI X700 graphics card has been limited. In addition, you had better not expect the suspend/resume cycle being 100% fluent. If you are an Open Source idealist like I do, these problems may be minor for you - if not, consider buying a Mac. Since I didn't spend my own money for this machine, I can honestly say there may be clearly better alternatives for Linux out there.
| Device | Model | Status | Driver | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACPI & powersave | Partially works | Suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk (hibernation) both works. However, occasional problems may occur when resuming from suspend-to-ram. (Note: I'm using open-source radeon driver - ATI's fglrx may broke suspension.) Bad news: speedstep-centrino module doesn't load on this machine ("No such device"). You can use acpi-cpufreq, which supports frequence scaling but not voltage scaling, rising the CPU temperature by 5-10 °C. Besides the fan running most of time, you get only 2 hours battery life - not much. I doubt a BIOS bug. |
||
| Video card | ATI Mobility Radeon X700 PCI Express | Works | radeon or fglrx | You have two choises: X.org's open source radeon driver works fine but has no 3D capalities, while ATI's closed-source fglrx driver has 3D acceleration, but does not support multiple X servers or suspend mode. Updated 1/2006! New fglrx 8.20.08 finally supports suspension. However, multiple X servers, XV with OpenGL enabled, and XComposite are NOT supported, and you can not change the monitor setup or enable tv-out without restarting X. What a poor driver from ATI after all! |
| WLAN | Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG | Works | ipw2200 | No problems. Supported by wpa_supplicant. |
| Ethernet | Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5788 | Works | tg3 (included in vanilla) | Gigabit mode not tested, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. |
| Soundcard | Intel AC'97 ICH6 | Works | snd_intel8x0 (included in vanilla) | SPDIF works. Note that this is an optical SPDIF device – you will need a TOSLINK cable, coaxial one won't work. It took me a while to realize that optical transmitter can be integrated into regular 3,5 mm stereojack. Even Acer's Scandinavian helpdesk misinformed me that it's electrical SPDIF – it's clearly not. Anyway, with the proper cable you are able to carry digital sounds (whether a stereo or surround) to your amplifier. |
| USB2 | Intel ICH6 (UHCI/EHCI) | Works | uhci_hcd, ehci_hcd (included in vanilla) | 15 MB/s throughput from my external USB2 disk. |
| FireWire | Texas Instruments TSB43AB21 | Not tested | ieee1394 (included in vanilla) | Not tested, but the driver loads ok, so I guess it should work. |
| Bluetooth | Built-in USB device | Works | I said apt-get install bluez-utils && /etc/init.d/bluez-utils start, hitted the bluetooth button in the frontpanel, and voilá, the magical blue led started lighting. I haven't really tested it, but at least my ancient mobile phone is able to detect the laptop via BT. | |
| Modem | Intel ICH6 AC'97 softmodem (Conexant) | Partially works | HSF softmodem driver | It's a commercial driver, baby. A demo version works only at limited speed. Anyway, I was happy to get the modem work at all, so 2 kB/s is just fine in emergency cases. |
| DVD-writer | Not tested | Need to buy writable DVDs. This far I've only burnt CDs. Most likely DVDs works as well, since these are standard ATAPI stuff IMHO. | ||
| Card reader | Built-in USB device | Doesn't work | Integrated into CardBus chip manufactured by ENE Technology. No linux driver exists, sadly. Please mail to the manufacturer. | |
| Touchpad | Partially works | psmouse (included in vanilla) | No driver for 4-way scrolling button. It's been listed under Linux as "Generic system peripheral" PCI device from ENE Technology Inc. | |
| Hotkeys | Doesn't work | Unfortunately acerhk driver doesn't support 3210 series, meaning hotkeys doesn't work. Pretty useless anyhow, I think. By giving the acerhk driver a parameter force_series=240 you are able to control the email led indicator via /proc/driver/acerhk/led, if that makes you happy. |
This page was updated in May 2006 by holster at iki fi.