Acer Timeline 3810T

[cyberfish]

Okay I flashed it using unetbootin (choose FreeDOS for distribution, boot with the vanilla option - you'll see what I mean when you boot it) on my USB drive.

Suspend still doesn't work. I haven't noticed anything different than before.

[arvin0416]

Thanks a lot... i had a problem with my Atheros Network card driver in Ubuntu 9.04 installed in my Acer 4810t, i just follow the instructions posted by "tokyoahead" and it works... thanks so much...

[cyberfish]

Yours has an Atheros card?... how come all ours have Intel cards?

EDIT: Ah, sorry. I thought you meant wireless .

[miegiel]

In response to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireTimeline/Fixes

Switch SATA mode from AHCI to IDE

Enter the BIOS and change the SATA mode from AHCI to IDE. (Feel free to write this process down in more detail if you like)

Issues

* Changing mode to IDE will prevent you from dual booting into Vista
* NCQ is disabled (does the disk have NCQ?)

The 320GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B (that came in my timeline) doesn't support NCQ. Hitachi's data sheet doesn't mention NCQ at all (marketing rule 27.2 : Don't mention anything the product doesn't support) and this web shop (click Technical Specs) puts a pretty X behind NCQ.

Besides NCQ, AHCI also supports hotswapping hard disks, but that's pretty useless in a laptop. It seems to me that disabling AHCI has no real disadvantage in these acers, till you upgrade your disk anyway

Oh, almost forgot, some of the timelines have westerndigital HDD's. I didn't research those since I don't know the exact model

If anyone has any thoughts on this or can post her/his WD disks NCQ abillities (or lack there off) please do.

ps win7 gave a BSOD with AHCI enabled.

[teeepeli]

I bought Acer Travelmate 8371, it's kind of a business version of the 3810t with matte screen and fingerprint reader.
HDD in this one is 250GB Toshiba MK2555GSX and it supports NCQ and Karmic is running fine in this with AHCI enabled.

So far only problems i have are that the wireless power saving can't be enabled and suspend doesn't work (i have even upgraded bios to 1.10).

Fingerprint reader is made by Egistec and model is probably SS801U which should be supported by Egistecs BioExcess Linux software.

The biometric software needs to be used with specific branded sensor. Therefore, our company provides BioExcess mainly to OEM companies, who then incorporates it into their products. And currently, the BioExcess Linux Edition is still not available for download on our website.

[cyberfish]

I bought Acer Travelmate 8371, it's kind of a business version of the 3810t with matte screen and fingerprint reader.
HDD in this one is 250GB Toshiba MK2555GSX and it supports NCQ and Karmic is running fine in this with AHCI enabled.

So far only problems i have are that the wireless power saving can't be enabled and suspend doesn't work (i have even upgraded bios to 1.10).

Fingerprint reader is made by Egistec and model is probably SS801U which should be supported by Egistecs BioExcess Linux software.

Both problems are known (but no known fix). If you really need the extra battery life now, I suggest downgrading to 2.6.30 (which, IIRC, does support power saving).

As for fingerprint reader, have you looked at the fprint project? It seems to support quite a few fingerprint readers last time I checked. The program (and biometric authentication in general with Linux) is far from mature, yet, though. My last laptop (HP tx2000) had a fingerprint reader, and I got it to work with fprint, but I ended up using plain old password login anyways. It's too unreliable. Fingerprint authentication doesn't offer any more security than plain old password authentication anyways. It's just a convenience thing. The machine itself is full of your fingerprints .

[miegiel]

I bought Acer Travelmate 8371, it's kind of a business version of the 3810t with matte screen and fingerprint reader.
HDD in this one is 250GB Toshiba MK2555GSX and it supports NCQ and Karmic is running fine in this with AHCI enabled.

...

That seems to confirm my suspicion that the AHCI issue is caused by the lack off NCQ support on the hard disks. Since cyberfish already reported :

Has anyone tried a different harddrive to eliminate the problem?

I can confirm that the Intel SSD version does NOT have this problem (I can use AHCI without any kernel parameters).

Despite lacking a spinning disk intel's SSD's do support NCQ

[cyberfish]

Ah, so it's problem with the SATA driver, since it can't correctly detect the lack of NCQ through negotiating with the device.

Anyone care to file a bug report? (I don't have the problem myself, so not me this time )

It's probably not 3810t-specific, though. Tons of laptops use this chipset. But I'm surprised the problem has not been fixed yet (the chipset has been out for a year already, and Intel is usually pretty good at making good Linux drivers).

EDIT: Actually, on a second thought, it could be the Hitachi harddrive that's falsely claiming support for NCQ. We'll need another drive that DOESN'T support NCQ to be sure.

[miegiel]

EDIT: Actually, on a second thought, it could be the Hitachi harddrive that's falsely claiming support for NCQ. We'll need another drive that DOESN'T support NCQ to be sure.

Win7 also treats you on a BSOD during boot up if AHCI is enabled in the BIOS. Though vista didn't have any issues, I wouldn't put it past acer to mod NCQ or AHCI out of their version of vista. At the moment I'm inclined to blame the disk, after all, it's a hitachi

[xir_]

anyone know why the 4810t has a BIOS revision number 1.20 and the 3810t has a revision of 1.10.

anyone know if is there any key difference between the two?