Friday, April 2, 2010

Fedora 13 on acer 5740

Recently I had to install F12 on an acer 5740. However, F12 simply failed to installed on that machine. The laptop had the following configuration.

  • Core i3 processor
  • 3 GB RAM
  • Intel graphic media accelerator
  • Broadcom gigabit ethernet (BCM57780)
  • Atheros AR928X wireless chip
F12 always failed in hardware detection stage itself. I started F12 installation with a no probe. However, I did not have a local installation media and I was doing a network installation. Unfortunately, the network card was not recognized by F12. I eventually gave up on the F12 idea and started downloading F13 alpha.

F13 (64 bit) went it just fine. Installation started in the graphical mode. I made a custom installation with about 1700+ packages selected. It took some time to install. But, I did not calculate the exact time for installation. All I remember is that it was not that particularly fast.

After it came up, I faced two issues. One was about the broadcom card. The stock tg3 driver did not recognize the card. I downloaded and installed the driver from broadcom site and it started working.
http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/netxtreme_desktop.php

The other issue is with cpuspeed daemon. It just crashes my kernel on reboot. Guess, the driver exit is not written properly. But as it crashes only at the reboots (and still reboot works fine), I am really not bothered about it.

Well, the graphic and wireless drivers worked just out of the box. But after an update, it was hanging at the end of boot-up. I changed to runlevel 3. However, X still works if I do a startx

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hi.. did u try ubuntu 11.04 with acer 5740...? bcoz i m going to buy this laptop...

Sarin said...

Nope. I have not tried Ubuntu. Simply because, it has a no entry board for developers :) Btw, F13 is having issue with display. I am experiencing flickering. I had registered this bug when it was beta. It is not yet resolved and does not look like they are going to resolve it.