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

Painful learning

If you are installing XP on Acer aspire 5740, change the drive mode from AHCI to ATA in BIOS.
Else, you will get the STOP 0x0000007B(0xF78DA63C,0x0000034,0X x0000000,0x0000000) error with the notorious blue screen.
Thanks a lot to the guys at this forum: http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156593

Ok, second painful learning, do not delete your favourite distro's iso image to create space for movies :(