Hello all, I am writting you all from my new Laptop. I purchased a Acer 5002 and I can't be happier. All of my hardware was detected by Slackware just perfectly. The interesting thing is that at some points, my desktop for example, my font looks fantastic and images look great. Yet on other places, konqueror's back button and my cursor look jagged. All my drivers are installed correctly. I installed numerous fonts just to see if that was the issue without any sucess. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

I am thinking of getting this laptop. Does Gentoo work on this? What kernel patches or drivers are required for the NIC, Wifi ?

The laptop works rather well under many distributions thus far. I have recompiled my kernel as I like to customize my experience. As for Gentoo I really cannot tell I have yet to install that. The one thing that I am noticing is the lack of video support for the SIS chipset what poor quality. Hope this helps you.

Don't want to hi-jack this thread but....

I've tried out most of the big distro's (ubuntu/slackware/debian/suse/fedora) and I ended up sticking with Suse...the wifi wont work because of some software control the radio requires and hasn't been written. The NIC works sort of. If you use any kernel newer than 2.6.10 then you MUST turn acpi=off or the NIC will not get an ip address. There is an unresolved bug report sitting on bugzilla for this, I haven't tested 2.6.14 yet, but I don't have much faith since nothing's been noted. I'm tempted to just go out and buy a pcmcia nic that is supported.

If you get it cheap it's a good laptop, I got the complete no-frills model for about 900$CDN... Ml-30 proc w/ 512MB ram and 60GB hd. As previously mentioned the video is horrid, I don't seem to have 3d at all...can't even play tuxracer outside of software rendering (which is unplayable). But I didn't buy it for playing games, I bought it for working and it meets my needs quite well (minus the acpi stuff, I have no indication of battery life...it runs full tilt all the time and I have to press the power button when it's 'halted' it doesn't turn off on its own. Again I could run an old kernel, but I don't like that idea any more than the idea of going and buying a PCMCIA card at this point).

Again sorry for the hi-jack. I've installed the MS fonts that are available in the suse repository and that's about it. I seem to get an error about the unicode that my system is using when I try to run jGrasp but I believe it to be specific to that application as I've had that error no where else (and it's just an annoying pop-up when I start the application...it doesn't seem to affect anything else).


Chado