Debian sarge on Acer 1680 agpgart problem
 

I'm trying to install Debain Sarge onto my new Acer Aspire 1680WLMi. I've tried with the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels (need to do acpi=off for 2.6 cos it doesn't even boot the install otherwise).

It gets as far as installing the base system and rebooting. The boot reaches the Hotplug subsystem which attemps to load the agpgart module.

This is where the boot freezes and I have to turn it off.

There are no error messages. It doesn't get as far as logging as far as I can tell. I've been using Knoppix to look at it and tweak things. I've tried blacklisting the module in /etc/hotplug/blacklist but it still attemps to load it

If I could just get the thing to boot I could try compiling some alternative agp drivers!!

Things arn't looking good for getting Debian on this machine. The fact that knoppix works to some extent is encouraging but a lot of hardware doen't work with that. I hope I can make it work and any help will be greatfully recieved. I spent a lot of money on a laptop and can't even get as far as installing a decent OS :-(

lspci from knoppix is at www dot mserver dot co dot uk/linux-questions/lspci.txt
Knoppix lsmod doesn't appear to use agpgart. lsmod from knoppix is at www dot mserver dot co dot uk/linux-questions/knoppix-lsmod.txt
My first post so they won't lt me do url's :-)

Hi,
Have you been there http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/acer.html You may find information for hardware like your. Sadly, nobody post a success story with your kind of laptop to this day.

Good luck,

Thanks, I have looked but like you say my lappy isn't listed and no-one with similerish hardware seem to ahve run into the same problem!! I might have to figure this one out myself. If I could stop the driver attempting to load and boot the system that would be a start!!

at the boot prompt, go thru Fn1-Fn8 see if there is parameter to help you, after the installation you can look for the agpgart module with modconf.

Grub boot loader! f keys have no effect. Debian recovery mode also fails at the same point.

i meant when you're reinstalling. :)

I tried an expert install and disabled various drivers without any luck!! In the end I gave up and did a kanotix HD install which worked well. Very impressed. winmodem didn't work (no suprises there), USB only woks at 1.1 speed, haven't looked into wifi yet but other than that everything seems to work. I'll proberbly start a new thread about my kanotix HW problems next !!!! Thanks for your help.

Hi,
I 'm sorry merlininthewood i've the same laptop as yours , but of course the same problem.
I've already tried a Mandrake, a Red Hat, a Free BSD but none of them worked.
The only one that works is the Fedora 2.
I made an attempt with the last Woody but unfortunately the screen resolution seems to be too small to display the last command lines...

Have you tried any other distribution?

No.

Other than debian sarge i only tried Kanotix like I said. This is a live on cd debian based distro (modified knoppix) that can be installed onto HD. http://www.kanotix.de

I had to modify the XFree86 config to get 1280x800 resolution but other than that it went pretty smoothly.

Merlin